I was adopted in England in October 1969. I am a writer and historian, have written a book about my own search and am currently researching a book on the history of adoption told through over a 100 interviews with people who have experience of it. I founded The Same Boat in October 2004.

It was only in my early thirties, in November 2001, that I was jogged into deciding to look for my birth mother, something I had previously denied that I wanted or needed to do. My birth father had died before I was born so finding him was not an option.

About Us

Resources

Join thesameboat.org

Have your voice heard

Make a donation

I took the painful step of telling my mother and we ended up going to find my adoption files together. It looked liked it would be easy to find her, we had so much information now - names, dates, addresses, her University, Cornell in upstate New York.

I gave the job of tracing her to a researcher, an amazing woman called Ariel Bruce. But over one and a half years later we still hadn't found her. The facts my birth mother had given to the adoption agency were not adding up. She had given false information, most probably about her and my birth fathers names.

I decided that, without knowing her name, it was an impossible task, that I would never find her, that there must be some deep dark secret that had had her lie about it.

But in September 2003 I decided I would have a big push - do whatever it took for three months and see what happened. I got a team of people to help me - fellow professors, students and journalists.

Finally, having secured the address where we knew the courts had written to my birth mother - 523 Hughes Hall which was a male only dorm and part of Cornell Law School - I went over to the States and persuaded the School to help me trace all the men who had lived in this hall of residence in the late 1960's. One of them must have known my birth mother.

My birth mother had given her name as Mary Randall and my birth father's name as Matthew Bailey. In the Law School archives was a record of a boy living at 523 Hughes Hall in 1969, the year of my birth, called Randall Matthew Kelly. My mother had used his Christian name as her surname and his mother's maiden name as his last name.

Once we knew this, all the pieces fell into place and I was able to find him, still alive and living on the Upper East Side in New York. He is my birth father. Through him I found her. It took just under three months.

I met my birth parents six weeks later in December last year and we now see each other regularly and are creating an extended family, in which I have four parents.

I can be contacted at virginia@thesameboat.org.