Category Archives: Adoptee Discrmination

Meeting my kin in Finland and the truth of biological family

“This is the coolest thing that’s happened in a really long time. Welcome to family.”

 Comments shared with Rudy Owens by his distant cousin shortly after meeting his Finnish family in Finland in September 2023

By Rudy Owens, MA, MPH

A sign commemorating fallen Finnish military who died in the wars with the USSR between 1939 and 1944, at the Museo Militaria, in Hämeenlinna, Finland

For years I have repeated a phrase that speaks an eternal truth known to many cultures, globally.

In the English language that wisdom is: “Blood is thicker than water.” In Finnish, they say, “Veri on vettä sakeampaa.” Other languages also explore this idea about the primacy of kinship, such as Mandarin. The Chinese expression translates to: “Family relationships are stronger than any others.”

It is an expression many of us know, almost by instinct.

Its meaning is universal. It reflects how we have evolved, through evolution and our common, shared history, grounded in our closest relations. It also defines how humans have and continue to relate to those closest to them, especially their biological family and blood kin.

For me, that truth became even more clear following my incredible 11-day trip in September 2023 to Finland, one of my ancestral home countries. In this Nordic nation, six years a row voted the world’s happiest country, I had this truth reaffirmed in unforgettable ways. I shared these life-affirming moments with the people I met and with whom we collectively share relatives dating back more than two centuries.

They are and always will be my “family.” They are and always will be my kin.

Ultimately, biological family connects all of us, no matter our age, race, country, or culture.

Family is universal. We all have family—biological family. It’s the common glue that binds us to others.

The acclaimed writer Alex Haley, author of Roots: The Saga of an American Family, succinctly described our collective humanity after the publication of his globally beloved family history of formally enslaved west Africans brought to America. “We are first many millions of families sharing this earth,” said Haley. “After the miracle of life itself, the greatest human common denominator is families.”

Rudy Owens in Helsinki, Finland, one of his ancestral countries of his biological relatives

Adoption secrecy hides my Finnish family story

As an adventure of discovery and learning, my trip to Finland in September 2023 exceeded my wildest expectations. In less than two weeks I drove more than 2,000 kilometers and met and befriended my distant Finnish relatives.  I had not known they existed for certain less than a month earlier.

We created bonds, and they felt sturdy. I instantly felt I was standing on a solid foundation that had been missing for decades, to an ancestral land and a wider kin network. This footing was as solid as the granite rocks that cover the Finnish landscape.

More than six weeks after my wonderful meetings with my kin relatives in Finland, I am still struggling for words to describe the undeniable reality that the trip proved to me about blood kinship and life.

Among the most certain and provable facts before me are photos, showing my resemblance to my relatives, removed now by three generations.

The evidence that I am related to my Finnish kin is visible to anyone looking at our photos. The strongest similarity is my uncanny facial and even body similarities to a younger male distant cousin, who I did not meet. One of my other distant cousins, who is his sister, tells me, “The resemblance is uncanny.” In fact all the family members who have met me agree on this visual reality they can confirm with their eyes.

The other fact I can grasp with a firm grip is the shared joy we all felt by simply connecting. It felt organic and without effort.

But how should one describe soul-felt joy meeting one’s blood kin one has never met in more than a half-century? How should a person explain how he is greeted warmly as family, with a new nickname “Uncle Rudy” (“Rudy-setä” in Finnish) among the youngest newfound relatives?

More importantly, how do you tell people like disinterested media, public health officials, and lawmakers about this feeling, particularly when such kin ties have been denied to you by state law and the power of a state and its public health bureaucracy for decades?

Despite all of the positive experiences I can share about connecting with my kin, they don’t change that I am still denied the legal right to have these blood and family relations and knowledge of my identity and—in my case—Finnish ancestry by the full force of Michigan state law.

… GO HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY PUBLISHED ON MY WEBSITE.

Coming home to my Finnish ancestral villages, in defiance of Michigan’s adoption secrecy laws

During my trip to Finland in September 2023, I visited two ancestral villages of my Finnish kin, Kortesjärvi and Alahärmä, in a rural farming area of South Ostrobothnia.

The region is located inland from the Baltic Sea, east of Vaasa. I went there with my Finnish relative and her husband on September 7, 2023.

On that life-changing trip, I felt a visceral connection to my ancestral home, where a quarter of my biological family traces its historical roots. These are very peasant farming roots. It’s hard to describe the joy I felt. I tried to capture some of that on this video. It only does those feelings partial justice. The feeling was one of utter and total joy. (I will be publishing a story soon about this amazing trip.)

By sharing this video here that is filled with elation, I am not gloating.

I am pointing out a brutal reality of contemporary politics that marginalizes tens of thousands of adoptees born in Michigan, like me. I’ve been raising this issue consistently since 2015, and published my adoption history/memoir documenting these wrongs in detail.

By law in the state of Michigan, I am also denied the information about my ancestral and living kin, like tens of thousands of other born and then relinquished there.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D), supposedly a progressive, and the Democrats who control the Michigan Legislature, have done nothing to fix decades of this injustice denying people the right to know their kin/past.

It remains deeply painful to me to know that this joy I had, finding my past, my kin, my ancestral villages in Finland, is denied to tens of thousands of Michigan adoptees, still, by law.

As I continue to share, Gov. Whitmer ultimately owns this failure. She can lead and fix it. To date, she has done nothing and has never communicated publicly she will do a thing to correct a historic injustice. Without a cost to her politically, nothing will change. That is up to those of us who seek reform to exact the leverage to move reform.

We all have a right to know our origins

Finding myself and my kin in beautiful Finland

This month, I had the good fortune to have one of the most memorable trips I have ever had.

I visited Finland, or Suomi, in Finnish.

It is the ancestral home of my maternal great grandmother and great grandfather. I am a proud Finnish-American by birthright.

Using information shared with me by my biological family, along with the help of strangers as well as just good luck, I found my biological relatives before I Ieft for the country of some of my ancestral kin. We share a common ancestry to small villages in South Ostrobothnia, about 75 kilometers from the city of Vaasa. We are bound and connected by blood.

Over several days, I met many of my kin in different cities. I will be sharing more on that later. Those encounters reaffirmed for me, again, the basic human truth of the critical importance of kin relationships and biological family to our place in the universe. Deprived of that knowledge, we will forever feel adrift. With that knowledge, we feel a connection.

Many thousands of Michigan-born adoptees, like me, are denied this soul-enriching information by discriminatory state laws.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, has done nothing to try and fix this grave injustice after nearly six years in office, though her and her staff are well aware of his legal inequality to thousands of people. There is also indifference visible by public silence to this systemic denial of basic rights by the Democratically controlled state legislature as well.

The only solution to this problem is the passage of lasting legislative reform.

I have been working on this for years, and I’ve reached out repeatedly to lawmakers, the state vital records keepers, and to Gov. Whitmer’s senior staff. They know about the issue, and they will do nothing unless they are forced to do something by residents in Michigan impacted by these laws.

Here are some suggestions I shared earlier this year for lobbying for reform to end this harm. I hope you will support these efforts, even if you are not a Michigan-born adoptee. As my Finnish relatives would say, “Kiitos!”

A hunger to know who we are and from where we have come

Alex Haley’s 1976 classic: Roots: The Saga of an American Family

When I wrote my book about the U.S. adoption system and experience, I felt I had an almost moral duty to acknowledge the profound wisdom shared by the great African American writer Alex Haley.

Haley’s two great works, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) and Roots: The Saga of American Family (1976), stand out in the pantheon of American letters. I connected to both for different reasons, but I was more personally drawn to his family story in what most people today call Roots. For an entire generation of Americans and people like me who came of age when it was published, it helped to shed light on the U.S. slavery system that erased the past identities of millions.

For me, Roots is also deeply universal.

Haley’s family’s story from west Africa to the horror of the Middle Passage and chattel slavery and then to freedom is one of the most important historical and creative works in our collective American experience. It also speaks to me because he captures the essential truth of finding life’s meaning: answering the siren call to our most important question: “Who am I?”

Haley explored this life question in the boldest of fashions, weaving together a story of American violence and the history of enslaved Africans who were Haley’s ancestors, brought to what became the United States in the New World. Telling this story, however, was not easy. It nearly killed the author.

Haley described to NPR in an interview in February 1977 how he also communed with his ancestors on a cargo vessel, traveling from Liberia to the Florida. He almost committed suicide on that trip, coming close to jumping off the ship’s bridge amid a wave of depression and uncertainty. Instead he found a way to make a personal connection to the horrific Middle Passage, which describes the slave trade and its human cargo from West Africa to the Americas and the Caribbean. Haley heard the voices of his family ghosts, and he broke down in tears when he made that breakthrough.

All of us can thank those ancestors who visited with Haley that painful night in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, when he hit the pit of his own despair and cried from his soul. What he left all of us has touched generations of readers, including me.

Paying homage to Haley in my memoir

In 2018 I published my own “family” saga, searching for my hidden past, in my memoir and public health history of adoption called You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are. In chapter six on my book, under the chapter title “Blood is Thicker than Water,” I wrote:

Photographer Mickey Adair, used under a CC 3.0 license

“Haley achieved international fame for documenting his long and successful family search that stretched back to his ancestral villages in Gambia, in West Africa. Haley eloquently describes why his own search mattered, particularly for many African Americans whose histories and families were cruelly severed by slavery. It was an institution that separated them from their homeland and then children from their families in the Americas. ‘In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage—to know who we are and where we have come from,’ writes Haley. “Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning. No matter what our attainments in life, there is still a vacuum, an emptiness, and the most disquieting loneliness.’” 

I have clear and sharp memories watching the TV series Roots. It made me confront many ugly truths about my country and also my hidden past as an adoptee. I never talked publicly about my thoughts then. But the seed grew and matured. I never, ever doubted the truth of what this inner voice was saying—exactly the way Haley described it.

I am not the only one to have been touched by Haley’s work and his universal story of what it means to be a human being. Today, Roots has been published in 37 languages.

And like Haley, my journey in life as an adoptee robbed of his past and kin connections demanded that I confront that vacuum and disquieting loneliness, if it took all my life to do that.

Each chapter of my life has had different ways of confronting this feeling, and soon I will be taking a much-anticipated and long-awaited journey. It is time.

Reminders of Haley’s universal truths today

As I have drawn closer to my more than two-decades delayed trip one of my ancestral home countries, Finland, I was reminded about what Haley shared in his work and in his many interviews about his family’s story.

After some failed starts using a biological family tree of my U.S. biological relatives and good old Google, I finally connected with very distal biological kin in Finland.

It was part luck, part detective work, and part “sisu,” which means stoic determination and grit to overcome adversity in the Finnish language. With my new-found Finnish kin, our shared bloodlines and history can be traced back to small villages in the Finnish administrative regions of Ostrobothnia and South Ostrobothnia, when Finland was under the control of the Swedish Empire in the late 1700s.

My ancestors and those of my Finnish relatives trace back to the village of Kortesjärvi, in South Ostrobothnia, Finland.

Since the first “family email” arrived from Finland this month, I have connected with a couple of my distant relatives. We are now planning to meet for an impromptu gathering with other relatives spread out around the country when I arrive there. (Details are still being worked out.)

One of my relatives wrote me that I even resembled two sons they have: “This is such an exciting possibility to learn more of our family history. It is also heartwarming to think that it may be possible to see you.” Even before reading this line, some of my Finnish-American biological relatives told me that many of my biological relatives always thought I resembled my great grandmother, who was born in Finland and emigrated to the United States to northern Michigan in the early 1900s. (Two of my biological relatives told me that: a biological cousin, and only recently, as well as another more distant family relative who I just connected with for the first time ever this year.)

None of this is a surprise, and yet it is profoundly visceral. It is hard to describe this to others, except for me to repeat what Haley shared so absolutely perfectly.

After my Finnish relatives and I connected, I have been sharing regularly a line on social media that I have been sharing for years: “Blood is thicker than water.” I have never, ever doubted this truth. My trip, literally “going home” to the old ancestral villages of Finland, is nothing more than proof of this knowledge of what it means to be connected and to be human.

The elegance and simplicity of equality in Vermont

Vermont Department of Health application for an adult adoptee to obtain their true birth records (page 1 of 2).

Today is the first day that adult adoptees born in Vermont, who are at least 18 years old, can access their original birth/vital record and not face legalized inequality by discriminatory statutes that single out adoptees as second-class people who do not receive equal treatment by law.

Well done to everyone who made this happen there. I salute all you did for adoptee rights and adoptees everywhere.

It is important to remember, even in the absence of any “landmark court case,” this inequality in most U.S. states violates the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, Article VII.

I also appreciate what the public health employees in Vermont did in communicating this legal reform, passed in the 2022 legislative session.

This is how the Vermont Department of Health communicates equality by law to adoptees born in the state of Vermont, as of July 1, 2023.

What I see on the updated website for the Vermont Department of Health today is the simple elegance of equality for adoptees without harmful conditions, obstructions, discrimination, bias, and public health and human health harm. It is only today, July 1, 2023, that an adult adopted person born in Vermont who is 18 years old can access a document all non-adopted persons born in the USA can access without any discrimination.

Just think about that. And there are anywhere from 5 to 8 million adoptees in the United States, most of whom are still denied this legal right.

This was the result of concerted advocacy, and, again, I applaud all who led the efforts for long-denied reform. It’s important to remember that this law change restoring rights that were taken away, also by law, will not and does not erase decades of past harm.

The New England Adoptee Rights Coalition has noted, “Vermont was among the first 20 states to revoke an adopted person’s right to request and obtain a copy of their own unaltered, original birth certificate in 1946.”

However, the decades-overdue restoration of basic legal rights is a path that other states can follow.

Will Michigan follow Vermont?

The state I remain focused on is my birth state, Michigan, which denies the simplicity of basic legal equality to thousands and thousands of adoptees.

As of July 1, 2023, this is how one of a few Michigan adoption-related statutes looks like, creating a maze of confusion and nearly impossible barriers for any adoptee born in Michigan to ever obtain their original birth record, as a matter of law.

The so-called “progressive” governor, Gretchen Whitmer, continues to promote her chops supporting those who need a helping hand—except of course thousands of adoptees.

She has done nothing about this issue, and she is already in her fifth year in office, with no gesture, statement, or visible communication she cares about thousands of persons, many who are now aging and even dying, or that they will ever know their truth or even kin.

For comparison to Vermont’s reform, here is how inequality looks in Michigan. It is an absolute cluster.

I will keep trying to point out these issues in Michigan, which Vermont’s reform makes all the more glaring.

Vermont’s law gives me hope, when often what I feel is loneliness on the mountain top. And sometimes hope truly can be a wonderful thing.