Our agency was approached by a citizen of a foreign country. She had been adopted in early childhood, grew up abroad and all her life believed she was an only child. Recently she learned that this was not so: she had been born with a twin brother.
The news turned her understanding of her own life upside down. Surprise, joy, excitement — and a question that gave her no peace: somewhere in Russia her own brother might be living, adopted as a baby by another family, just as she had been.
A Search Through the Archives
She asked us to find her brother. It turned out that he had been adopted through the Russian adoption system. The task was not easy: decades had passed, and the life of an adopted child could have turned out any way at all.
The detectives began with the archival documents on the brother’s adoption. Such searches rarely go in a straight line: documents from long ago are kept in different places, some are lost, and surnames and addresses change over the years. Painstaking work produced the key information: we established where he lives now and learned about his family.
A Meeting After Forty Years
The most important part remained — the meeting. The first contact in such cases is the most delicate moment: a person needs time to accept news that turns their life upside down. The brother could not believe that after so many years someone was looking for him, let alone his own sister. Both sides were nervous and full of expectation. We carefully prepared their meeting so that this moment would be special for them.
And so, forty years later, a brother and sister who had once been separated saw each other. Joy, tears, the feeling that time has no power over true family bonds — the emotions of that meeting are beyond words.
Even decades later, you can find again those you thought were lost forever.
If You Are Looking for Your Family
We are proud to have been part of this story. Searching for relatives separated by adoption is long and delicate work: archives, the passage of time, new surnames. But even after decades, there is still a chance to find a family member. If you have learned that you have blood relatives somewhere, start by telling us everything you know: even fragmentary information helps the search. Adoption papers, the city and year of birth, names your adoptive parents mentioned — any of these can be a starting point.