Each year, thousands of people adopted through “closed” adoptions seek answers as to whom their biological parents are. A professional PI like Pickering Sullivan has the resources to find out.
ancestry.com and other online services are a great start. however we can help find birth parents even when these services fail.
Pickering Sullivan was engaged by an individual seeking his birth family. He had tried online services with no results. His had been a “closed” adoption from the 1960s. This meant hospital and adoption agency records were sealed, unavailable even to the adopted child later in life.
The only thing the individual knew about his birth family was that his birth mother was an employee at what he believed was his birth father’s family business—an industrial plant in the Midwest. Unfortunately, the business had been closed for many years and the owner of the business was now deceased.
Working with public records and our proprietary network of genealogy researchers, law enforcement and healthcare sources within the target community, we were able to collect and carefully analyze historical documents that led to a series of successful records requests from public agencies. This in turn led to a series of interviews with former employees who had worked at the business in the 1960s, which confirmed the names of both his birth mother and birth father.
Our research led us to learn that the birth mother and birth father were deceased. However, we were able to find the nephew of the subject’s birth father. This enabled our client to reach out and meet his birth mother’s family, who had no idea that she gave birth to a child—and have since welcomed our client warmly into the family.
If you’re an adoptee who has wondered about or searched for your birth family, talk to us about how we can help reunite you.