Tag Archives: Biological Kin

A new tradition begins for ‘Rudy-setä’

In 2023, I immersed myself in my Finnish heritage and connected with my Finnish kin in Finland.

This marks the first Christmas in my life that I have contact with my biological relatives in Finland. This followed a wonderful trip I made in September 2023 to Finland, one of the ancestral countries of my birth mother. 

We had only known each other in the month before I flew to Helsinki, after my search combined with good fortune and the kindness of a stranger helped re-connect familial bonds that had thrived decades between relatives in my birth state of Michigan and Finland.

I published a long-form story about that in November 2023. I highlighted our shared family history and how the inequitable system of U.S. adoption and discriminatory laws in Michigan still deny such connections to likely tens of thousands of adoptees relinquished in Michigan.

In Finland, to my amazing surprising, one of my biological family relatives shared with me a stack of letters and photos sent and shared by our shared relatives in Michigan—my maternal grandmother’s extended family. That stack of documents included letters stretching over decades and family photos that showed my Michigan family—including my birth mother as a young child!

Since coming home, my relatives in Finland and I have stayed in touch. We’ve done a few video calls and have shared messages through WhatsApp, which many tech-savvy Finns love to use. It’s an easy way to reach them. It encourages communications that make me feel much closer to this land of a quarter of my biological kin and their ancestors. My search for my past also opened up a world of discovery for me about Finland, a country voted six times in a row as the world’s happiest country.

Because of Finland’s amazing successes promoting human happiness and health, population health, and the “greater good” for its people, I have also have become more than smitten by my genealogical ties to Suomi, as Finland is pronounced and spelled in its delightfully distinct Finno-Ugric language.

I received a new name this year, courtesy of my Finnish nieces I met for the first time in September 2023.

Soon after I came back from Finland, I received a delightful family video shared with me by some of my relatives. They gathered together to wish me well, calling me “Uncle Rudy.” I earned this loving moniker because I have four distant nieces in this family (and I have another niece with another distant cousin, who I met as well). I loved it.

I felt something I had felt before—a biological kinship to younger children who all shared my genes. I was their “Uncle Rudy,” which in Finnish translates to “Rudy-setä.” I have now fully embraced this title, given to me by the young ones. It turned out to be the unexpected gift of 2023 that I could never have predicted when the year started.

This Christmas card was sent by one of my U.S. biological relatives to their Finnish relatives in 1947. My extended in family in Finland returned this card, to me, when I found and met them in Finland in September 2023.

As Christmas arrived this December, I shared a photo of a Christmas card a Finnish-American relative of mine shared with relatives in Finland in 1947, written in Finnish of course, as the U.S. relatives were bilingual. I wrote: “What an amazing thing to discover that holiday greetings were shared between family through the 1940s, and later. So I wanted to renew the old tradition, one of those Christmas cards sent from U.S. family in 1947, and perhaps start a new tradition.”

My relatives in Finland replied with similar holiday wishes, family photos, and shots of their homes decked out for the Christmas holiday. It was nice to have this connection, from halfway across the world, in a place filled with snow.

It is richly empowering to everyone to know they have kin and relatives, in the United States and also in countries around the world. All of the millions of adoptees in the United States, born there and abroad, have an inherent human right to share this connection to their kin and relatives, if that is a mutually shared wish.

I received wonderful Christmas wishes from Finland on Christmas Eve this year, from my Finnish relatives in Finland (hyvää joulua).

Earlier today, on Christmas, Dec. 25, 2023, I used the special occasion to advocated with Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to support the restoration of basic human rights to all Michigan-born adoptees. The best way that the fellowship and good will of the holiday can be shared, through the passage of possible legislative reform in Michigan, is to make it possible that all of us can know who our kin are and to feel the bonds of fellowship with those with whom we share a collective biological kinship. This is called being human. We all have a right to this condition by birth.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all, especially to those who may still not know their kin, their past, and their truth because of laws like those still enforced and in place in my birth state, Michigan.

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!”

My holiday card tradition on Thanksgiving day

Habits can be extremely rewarding.

One of mine is to write my holiday cards on Thanksgiving day. I have kept this tradition for more years than I can recall. No matter where I have lived or what happened on that day, I always found time to think about those in my life, including family and friends.

The act of writing and remembering reminds me of the bonds of connection I have with people far-flung across this country. Some of these connections help sustain me, good times and bad. Some have little impact in my life.

I went with an Oregon-themed card this year. In past years I have made my own. On each of the cards I create a personal message, written by hand and signed. A regular theme, if I can find one, is to share a positive wish of good fortune for the coming year. It is always preferable to be positive, even when we know some persons may be experiencing hard times, like some of my relations and friendships.

In my case, my card writing involves my circle of friends who seem to remain a part of my life as I age. They can be called my “chosen circle.” They are not family, for me at least. They matter a great deal in my life.

My “family card list” includes my step-family, my adoptive family, and my biological family. Because I am adoptee, and because that status is fraught with complexities about the meaning of “family,” my holiday card tradition has challenged me.

Having had a step-family since I was 18 years old, I can vouch first-hand that these relations are not easy. Step-family bonds are not blood-based or kinship-based.

Everyone in those dynamics knows the minefields, and to deny these tensions is to deny the critical role of genetic kinship in how all species, including humans, care for and help their close genetic relations succeed. This is equally if not truer of adoptive-family relationships.

I explore this in my greater detail in my adoptee memoir and critical exploration of the U.S. adoption system, in my chapter appropriately titled “Blood is thicker than water.”

Author and adoptee Rudy Owens gets ready to mail his 2022 holiday cards to his biological, step-, and adoptive family and friends on Thanksgiving day 2022.

In my book, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are, I write about the meaning of relationships with non-biologically related step-family and other distal adoptive kin: “There simply is no bond that joins us, much the way I feel about my adoptive cousins, uncles, and aunts. For me, there is no blood that ties us, nor DNA to bind us. We are not true kin, both as I perceive it and as I have experienced this relation for decades now.”

Yet each year, on Thanksgiving I will still write letters of fellowship for the coming Christmas, or winter holidays if you prefer to call it that.

There is very little power I have to create relations where none are hardwired to exist by the determinant laws of biology and genetics. What I do control is my ability to offer a hopeful gesture. Whether that gesture is accepted or rejected, like so much in our lives, is not in our power to manage.

Because I was separated as a newborn baby from my biological family by laws and systems that erased my past and discriminated against me and millions of others by status of birth, I only began my biological family relations in my mid-20s. I explain all of this in my book for any reader seeking to understand what that means for me and other adoptees.

As someone who is now in my mid-50s and getting older, I remain clear-eyed how those relations will remain forever impacted by this system of separating families. And with my surviving biological family members who I do have contact with, again, I am not able to control how they respond. It has never been simple or easy to explain to anyone who is not adopted and separated from their biological family relations.

So with Thanksgiving now behind us, and my holiday cards on their way to my blended, adoptive, and biological family, I will celebrate what some may call our betters selves, to be the person I prefer to be.

Yes, adoption as a system forever made my holidays a mixed up time, but I have, for decades now, not let this define the meaning I give this time of year freely.

No I will not share pictures to entertain you

Rudy Owens and his adoptive mother, 2008

Trends regarding adoptee rights advocacy come and go, and some stay and have lasting power. One I am seeing the past couple of days is promoting the importance of genetic closeness, ahead of National Adoption Month. Adult adoptees are showing photos of their birth kin they may know to show biological connections and to subvert what the month means to millions of adopted persons. I refuse to do that. I have several reasons I will share.

First, I refuse to be part of a spectacle for entertainment for others because of a broken and inequitable system. My severed connections are not for your pleasure. They demand collective actions by allies and political leaders to fix problems in order to support millions denied basic legal rights. More importantly, there are millions of adopted persons who may never meet their kin or ever see anyone who looks like them. This is spiritually painful to many of them, and it creates additional pain where there is a dark hole already.

Finally, this form of sharing allows us to ignore the greater and more important issues of finding solutions to overcome legal, cultural, and political barriers that prevent lasting reform. So yeah, count me out of another social media trend. I will be thinking about those adoptees who are of all ages and who are still denied knowledge of who they are and from whence they come.

For the record, when I launched my website for my memoir on the U.S. adoption system, I created an online gallery where I intentionally blacked out the identities of my biological and adoptive kin. It was my way of making clear my denied biological family connections will never be used as clickbait for media or anyone else for voyeuristic pleasure. I will not participate in this type of online bread and circus. Eventually I may share photos, but it will be purposeful so that it supports the larger goals of my efforts to restore adoptees’ legal rights. 

‘Can you help me with my search?’

Because my website for my book on the U.S. adoption experience is one of the few online resources exploring the history of the adoption system in Michigan in the post-World War II era, I am frequently contacted by strangers impacted by adoption in my birth state. 

The contacts include those who were placed for adoption like me looking for help finding their biological kin. I get emails from birth mothers who may have given up their child at my birthplace, Crittenton General Hospital, perhaps one of the largest maternity hospitals in the country that promoted the separation of mothers and their infants from the 1930s through its closing in 1975. I also have been contacted by adoptees seeking help petitioning Michigan courts for their records—a topic I address with online fact sheets that provide detailed steps how to do a court petition, with links to all documents that I have been able to find.

For nearly all requests, there literally is nothing I can do to help people with their searches. What I have already published, and update as I get more information, is the information that I can share.

I recently replied to an adoptee and a financial investor in Florida who wanted me to provide tips about doing a court petition. Because I am not a lawyer, I cannot provide legal advice. In his case, I sent him links to my two FAQs, which give as much information and guidance that I am able to provide.

I provided those materials because the state of Michigan and the courts in Michigan refuse to provide this information for adoptees, when they have a legal and moral obligation to assist the tens of thousands of adoptees separated by the state’s discriminatory laws denying all adoptees their legal, human, and equal rights to their vital records and their biological, medical, and family histories.

My birthplace, Crittenton General Hospital of Detroit, taken in 1965, the year of my birth

No, this is not fair

When I provide replies that do not offer the assistance people want, I usually never get a follow up or even a courtesy appreciatory comment that the materials published provide some people a small measure of information not given by the state. While that is a bit disappointing, my reasons for publishing my resources have never been about money or even gratitude. My focus remains on changing laws that deny rights to many that are decades in need of overhaul. If the material I share provides some small measure of assistance to the public, particularly adoptees and their kin searching for them, then that is a nice outcome too. That is reward in itself.

Being an adoptee, with few political and media allies, is by definition a hard place to be when you are searching for answers to who you are and your kin connections. No one’s story is the only story. All of them matter, and all adoptees, on their own, have to confront their reality in a way that makes sense for them.

My view on this approach to the adoptee-lived life may not be shared by many. However, my perspective, particularly at this point in my life, is that this is the often inequitable fate many adoptees were handed. It has nothing to do with fairness. Only the individuals can confront their fate in a way that makes sense for them. That is my own view, but also one deeply informed by the writings and wisdom of Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl.

Holocaust survivor, writer, and humanist Viktor Frankl, taken two years after his liberation from the Nazi camp system

Writing shortly after the war and his internment in Nazi camps, Frankl wrote that when faced with any situation in life, we all have a freedom to choose how we confront life’s obstacles. “Between stimulus and response, there is a space,” he wrote. “In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

That is not an idea that a lot of people, including adoptees, embrace for many reasons. But in my own experience, this perspective has helped me. It also continues to inform what I can and cannot do when others need help with the system that remains shrouded in inequity and legal barriers that deny equality.

A recent request

I was contacted last night by a man in his mid-70s who claimed that he was the father of a son born at my birthplace, in Detroit, who was then placed for adoption.

I do not know all of the details. I do not know why he was not involved in his purported son’s life earlier, but frequently the persons who had to deal with negative consequences of having a child out of marriage prior to the 1970s were the mother and the child. Historically and globally, women and children have borne the brunt of societies’ brutal and heartless treatment of single mothers and bastard children. This stigma fueled the system into which I was born an adoptee.

The historic reality of this treatment has never escaped me. It also was reflected in my own experience, with a father-by-sperm only, who never acknowledged I was his biological offspring by the time he died 15 years after I first met him. That is hardly a new story. It is part of the larger and universal story of illegitimacy.

When this main who claimed he was the father of an adoptee asked me to help give him assistance in finding his son, I literally had no advice for him because I do not provide that assistance or do searches for others. As someone who has now studied the history of illegitimacy and the U.S. adoption system’s historic treatment of infants and mothers, I did not feel greatly compelled to know why at the end of his life, he felt a need to make this connection. I do wonder why he was not there when his son started his life and needed to be with his biological kin.

Here is what I shared. I would like to think he might care enough about other children relinquished because of societal stigma, because of fathers who refused to accept paternity as history has documented as the norm now for centuries, and because of concerns for equality. If this man did take action to help other adoptees, and not just his own son he claimed to have sired, that would be great. But I am also a realist and know that we are often motivated by our own needs foremost. One of those needs is to know our family relations, as adoptees know best of all.

“I’m not in a position to provide people assistance with their personal searches,” I wrote the purported father of a fellow Detroit-born adoptee. “However, one way you can help adoptees is to consider helping all of them. You can do that by supporting legislation that would open records to them at the state legislative level, in Michigan and nationally, given you are involved in this system directly by fathering a son who was was placed for adoption. You can write a letter to the editor of your paper saying that’s needed. You can contact a TV station saying, if Michigan provided adoptees access to their records, I might have contact with my kin. These are all options you can take now. The information I have provided to adoptees is on my website to help any of them who are seeking justice and their past.”

I never heard back from him.