Our agency was approached by a U.S. citizen. Her biological mother had given her up right after birth and left her in the maternity hospital. The girl was adopted and taken across the ocean — that is where she grew up and where her whole life has been spent. And yet one day she decided to find the woman who had given birth to her.
The wish to know where you come from is familiar to many who were adopted. It may come in youth, or decades later, when one’s own life has long since taken shape. And often what lies behind it is not resentment but a need to fill a gap in one’s own story.
Starting from Scratch
In cases like this, the search starts almost from nothing. First, you have to establish who the woman is: her full name, her date and year of birth, her place of birth. Until then there is no one to look for — only the bare fact that a child was given up.
Our detectives established all of this. The mother had been born in one of the Soviet republics and held that republic’s citizenship — after the collapse of the Soviet Union, such a person is a foreigner in Russia. And she had lived here for a long time without any documents. That is what made the case truly difficult.
A Person Without Documents
A person without documents leaves almost no trace. As a rule, their housing is not in their name, their work is off the books, and they appear in no official records — none of the things normally used to trace someone’s path exist. Such a person has to be found bit by bit, through people and circumstances rather than paperwork.
Our detectives carried out a thorough investigation — and found her. We established where our client’s biological mother now lives.
Two Lives
The woman turned out to have a new family, but no children of her own in it.
The lives of mother and daughter had turned out very differently. The daughter, raised in another country, had made her way and found herself. The mother, meanwhile, had kept drifting through life.
Such encounters with the past are rarely simple. The person you find may turn out to be quite different from what you imagined, and to live quite differently from what you would like to think. That is why we tell our clients everything as it is — without embellishment and without judgment.
Everyone has the right to know where they come from — even when the truth about the beginning of their life is hard.
We passed on to our client everything we had been able to establish. What to do with that knowledge was now up to her.
If You Are Looking for Your Family
We search for biological parents and relatives on behalf of people who were adopted, including citizens of other countries. The passage of time, a change of citizenship, even years lived without documents do not make a search impossible — only longer and more painstaking.
A search goes faster when the client has at least some starting information: adoption papers, the name of a town or maternity hospital, names, dates, stories told by the adoptive parents. Even fragments matter: what seems a trifle often becomes the thread that can be pulled.