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!”

What the United States can learn from Finland’s famous ‘baby boxes’

Baby box display at the National Museum of Finland, in Helsinki

I am freshly back from a much-appreciated visit to Finland and Nordic countries (Denmark and Sweden briefly too). Did you know that Finland’s famous baby boxes, first created in 1939, are so well-loved by its people they honor it with a display in the National Museum of Finland, in Helsinki? I took this photo there during my visit to the city and its lovely museum. These boxes, with basic infant supplies, are given to new moms, to support them and their infants.

As someone who always looks to policies and upstream solutions to problems, I couldn’t help but compare the way Finland, as a successful nation with a robust public health system, supports new moms. We do not do this in my country.

In the United States we have created state and federal tax incentives to separate families, and even worse, so-called “baby dumpsters” are springing up with bipartisan support in states to coerce the surrendering of newborn infants from vulnerable mothers.

If we considered what Finland does, nationally, we could radically reduce the pressures on these vulnerable U.S. moms from “adoption promoters” to surrender children to strangers/non-biological family. I also recently read the Canadian territory of Nunavut has replicated the Finnish baby box too: “The baby box program started in Finland in 1939, and helped reduce the infant mortality rate to less than two in 1,000, from 90 in 1,000.” By the way, this is true public health in action. 

Additional Resources:

  • Visit the website for Kela, the social insurance institution of Finland, to see what is shared with mothers and families when they receive their baby box.
  • For more research on the Finnish baby box program, I highly recommend the book “Finntopia,” by Danny Dorling and Annika Koljonen, which provides a good historical summary of their history from just before the start of the Winter War and their ongoing use to promote the well-being of Finnish mothers, families, and children.
  • Scotland has also adopted the Finnish baby box model, and research has shown their wide acceptance and many benefits for mothers, families, and kids. See the 2021 publication “Baby Box: evaluation,” published in August 2021 by the Government of Scotland’s Learning Directorate. The National Health Service website also notes the government’s promotion of baby boxes nationally: “The Scottish Government has made a pledge that every baby born in Scotland will be given their own Baby Box. It will help families prepare for the arrival of their baby and contains essential items that you will need in the first 6 months.”

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.