My partner's mother, born in Damascus to a Jewish mother, didn't know the man who brought her up wasn't her real father until she found her birth certificate. Her birth father, a Muslim Turkish soldier in World War I, disappeared when she was a baby, leaving only a photo of a handsome figure on horseback in front of a Jerusalem hotel and a military citation in a name too common to trace.
A family tree with missing branches or no genuine family tree at all: it's not uncommon.
As our family has found, repercussions can roll down the generations. Too many of my friends, as young women of my generation, were "sent up north for a while", gave up babies or had them taken, after a lonely, sometimes punitive birth in a home for "unmarried mothers". There were few options and no support.
Now New Zealand's spectacularly outdated 1955 Adoption Act, designed with no regard for a child's right to know their biological, medical and cultural heritage, is undergoing an overhaul.
More stories are being told. "It means your entire authentic identity, your history is denied to you," writer and film-maker Barbara Sumner told John Campbell on Breakfast in 2020.
They were talking about Sumner's memoir of forced stranger adoption, Tree of Strangers, a devastating account of her fight – she had to go to court - to find out such basic information about her own life as her true date of birth. The 1955 Act was founded on the notion of a "complete break" between birth and adoptive families. It has caused untold damage.
Activism by adult adopted children resulted in a law change in 1985, making it possible for children and birth parents to find each other, though both could veto the release of information for adoptions that occurred before the law change.
After endless reports and inquiries over the years, there's a sense of a long overdue reckoning. It seems so obvious when you hear those affected talk about it.
"I lost my identity and was unable to be part of my own family because my mother had sex outside of marriage," Sumner told RNZ's Kim Hill.
"It's not about good or bad adoptive parents, she said. "It is the erasure that is the wrong thing … I am constrained for all my life, and my children and grandchildren and so-ons lives, by a contract that I am not party to."
Books being written, stories being told, even the number of shows devoted to putting together the missing pieces, speak to a powerful, fundamental human right to know where we come from, who we are, who made us.
The law review, as outlined by the Justice Department, seeks something more child-centred and to "ensure legal connections to adoptive and birth whānau" in the future. You would hope it will also address the harms of the past. If it succeeds there will be fewer of the secrets and silences that haunt so many families.
That won't just help those who have been part of the adoption system, it will help us all.
