Laura Read
Are you a product of your genes or your environment? For Laura West Read, our photographer, and an Evansville, Indiana, native, the answer seems to be genes. Read her story about finding her birth family and how that answered questions about herself.
It wasn’t really a mystery that I was adopted. I was an only child growing up and it was really obvious looking at my adopted family. I don’t fit in. My adopted dad had very dark hair and glacier-colored eyes and he was of average height. My adopted mother was a blond with brown eyes and was on the short side of average. They could both hold tan, and with me, five minutes out in the sun and I was a lobster. Then me with these greenish-blue eyes and bright red hair.
One day we found my baby book when I was cleaning out drawers. It said, ‘To our adopted daughter,’ and I said, 'Mom, what’s this word?’ because I was only 7. She took the time to kind of explain to me how my biological parents were very young teenagers and couldn’t raise me at the time because they didn’t have enough life experience to be parents. She made it a normal explanation. I had known for a long time that my parents were divorced. They got divorced when I was about 5. It turns out it was fabulous, because we were out one day and someone said, ‘You look just like your dad!’ and I said, ‘How is that possible? I’m adopted?’ He threw a huge fit. He was like, ‘No! That’s none of their business! Do not tell anyone! Your mom could have kept you but she chose to give you away. I am a hero. I signed the adoption papers.”
I thought, ‘Oh great.’ It just kind of gave me a weird feeling. I was 7 when all this happened. After that my mom kept it as normal as she could make it. Neither of us knew how each other worked. My mom wondered why I liked animals so much. I don’t want an animal in our house and I said, ‘Let’s have six dogs and a cat. How about 20 cats?’ She did her best to try and understand but she said, ‘I always knew that one day when you found your biological family, that they would be animal lovers.’”
It was a different childhood, I guess, but everyone’s is kind of different.
After I turned 18 I realized I wanted to know and I started looking at the laws in Indiana about how much information they would give me and how to get in contact with my biological family, things like that, which at the time wasn’t very much. You had to be 21 and you had to fill out a form and send it to the state health department. If there was a match, and your biological family said, yes, we want to meet you, they would send you the information. Right about that same time, my biological mother went to the health department in the city I was adopted and she filled out her contact information. She knew I was coming of age and figured if I wanted to contact her, that would be no problem. But she didn’t realize that she had to also send a form to the health department.
For 20 years, we feasibly could have had contact, but because of these weird, strange laws, there was no contact. The laws are so convoluted that she didn’t realize she had to sign the other form too. I didn’t know if she was busy living her life and she had a whole bunch of kids that she needed to take care of and maybe someday she would fill out those forms. All I knew is that she hadn’t flat out rejected it because there was never a ‘Do not contact.’ So there was always hope, even if it was slim.
I thought I’d keep on looking and I didn’t want to be one of those adoptee stories where one or both parents were shamed into giving the child away and now it’s years and years later and they don’t want to have anything to do with them. I didn’t want to press and then have something in there kind of break.
In the meantime, I had a child with a guy and his last name was Purdue. We had a very long relationship and two kids, Schuyler and Kenzie. Then my adoptive dad, a year and a half after Schuyler was born, married a woman who had two Purdue children. Her name was Donna.
Come to find out, my step sister and step brother were both adopted.
There was another little girl born on the same day I was, and apparently at the same hospital. My dad told me this much later. He said the other mother said how odd it was that we were playing together because the other parents got me halfway home from the hospital before they realized the mistake. They had adopted her. They said, ‘We were supposed to take the blond and we got the redhead.’ I’m not only looking for my mom, but a possible twin out there. There’s something more to this story. It’s either totally made up and he’s psychotic, or I’ve got a sister. Information, like where you were born or when, could be changed. Sometimes people would do that to keep the anonymity of the child, but my parents chose not to.
After that I moved to Bowling Green. My kids were about 1 and 11. I put in my information every time I moved to keep it current with the state, just in case my mom would start looking. And again, she didn’t realize she was supposed to be registering with the state. While I was living in Bowling Green I met Steven Read, who lived in Clinton.
Connected With Mom in Her 40s
My step-sister, Jenny, had been experiencing health issues and her kids started experiencing health issues. Right about the time her oldest graduated from high school, she decided she was going to search for her biological parents. So she does Ancestry and she ends up tracking down her biological relatives within a few months. She did a more direct approach. She directly asked people. Her biological mom had accepted her, but she was having issues with her biological father. She talked me into doing Ancestry and so finally I did. She helped me go through all the bizarre information. You have centimorgans, a unit of measurement. The level of centimorgans that match mean you’re an aunt or cousin.
My step-sister and I made out a family tree. It wasn’t until something in my non-identification disclosure with the state popped up. That’s information that biological parents give the agency and it can be true or not. You never know what you’re dealing with. It turned out to be accurate enough to say, ‘Hey, I know this story. It was my grandfather who passed away at an early age and left two young daughters. One of the daughters was Donna West. My step-mom was not the only Donna (Purdue) West in my family. It would also be my grandmother’s name. My grandmother’s name was West and my adoptive mother’s name was West.
We tracked down my biological father’s side and got it down to two brothers. The timing lead me to the oldest brother. Who had two other boys, meaning I have a pair of brothers on my paternal side and a pair of sister on my mother's. After some family history, it turns out that several of my adoptive paternal connections are biologically related paternally. Nobody wants to talk about the fact that adoptees are in actual danger of marrying a biological relative, but there I was an in-law of one, playing with another as a child and hanging out in the same places as first cousins. Not to mention, my step-sister, who's biological sister took family photo's for my step-sister.
Are we all keeping up with this convoluted name game? I hope so! I'm not so sure I am. This is a brief update from my article in Oak Ridge Neighbors Magazine. My wonderful step-sister, and I say step just for clarification, says we should write a book. Maybe, we will actually make that happen some day.
Thanks for reading!
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