Tag Archives: State of Michigan

Marking the first anniversary of my bio-mom’s death

Akseli Gallen-Kallela, 1903, Kansallisgalleria, “By the River of Tuonela,” study for the Jusélius Mausoleum frescoes, showing the mythical river where souls pass to the world of death

A year ago I received long-awaited news, the morning of April 26, 2024, that the woman who brought me into this world had died. She passed in the early morning hours in a hospital outside of Ann Arbor, Michigan, the college community where she spent the majority of her later decades. She was 83 years old.

I now have her death certificate, which the state of Michigan legally cannot deny me by law, unlike my original birth certificate showing our mother-child relationship that is sealed by law and that I took decades fighting to obtain in 2016.

The importance of a death certificate

Death certificates have symbolic power, in addition to being legal documents. They also are not sealed vital records. I requested and obtained an original copy of my bio-mom’s death record in August 2024. I needed it as part of my process to apply for Finnish residency by family relations, which I submitted in March 2025.

This process took nearly half a year, because of delays getting all my vital records showing my family ties, through my bio-mom, to my Finnish relatives and my 100 percent ethnically Finnish bio-grandma, mother of my bio-mom. She is the daughter of my great grandparents, who immigrated to Michigan from Finland and settled with thousands of other Finnish immigrants in Hancock, Michigan.

Despite the lawbreaking by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS)* in initially not releasing additional copies of my birth record that I needed to apply to Finland for residency, I prevailed. One reason I applied for this status to Finland is the rapidly disintegrating democracy of my country and my own desire to embrace a country that cares for its people in ways we do not in my country of birth. … 

See the full essay, “Marking time and the first anniversary of my bio-mom’s death,” on my website.

Filing second request for my original birth certificate being illegally withheld by Michigan

On September 30, 2024, I submitted an additional and completely redundant court order compelling the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) Vital Records office to release two copies of my original birth certificate.

The public health officials at Vital Records already were required by state law to release these records by a court order they received in 2016. Instead, the agency chose to flagrantly disobey the law. The two copies I requested were not released, as required by state law. The agency cashed my check and then coordinated a strategy with a Michigan court how to force an adoptee to take steps that are not prescribed by law. This has been a practice, according to a court official I spoke to anonymously, for two decades—and this is illegal.

I then requested and then received in late September 2024 the necessary court order from the 3rd Circuit Court of Michigan, in Detroit, ordering MDHHS to surrender the two original birth certificates I requested. This court order already was in the agency’s files.

I mailed in that order with a letter reminding MDHHS it had received my request for my records in mid-August six weeks earlier and was failing to adhere to the law.

This has happened to other adoptees in other states, where public health bureaucrats violate law and harm adoptees intentionally, often without any consequences and certainly no investigation of willful wrongdoing in managing critical vital records of a person’s original identity—the single most important vital record of all persons.

I am now waiting for my two original birth certificate copies.

This is the third video in my series documenting the state’s handling of vital records requests by adult adoptees, specifically those who have already secured a legal court order forcing the state to release a copy of an adoptee’s original birth certificate without any barrier such as requests for additional court orders for duplicate copies. I will post another video update on how Vital Records complies, finally, or continues to remain in violation of state managing vital records.

See my first video that I posted when I filed by request for two extra copies of my original birth certificate and my video made after I filed a request for a redundant court order that is not required by law for MDHHS to release my vital record it must do by law already.