For a lone parent with two children, a family tree project sounds straightforward.
That is, unless you are an adopted person from the 70s, like me. Back then, Australia practised , meaning there was no access to my original birth certificate and no identifying information about my family or ancestors.
This makes doing any -style research into our family history rather “complicated” – as my 12-year-old daughter politely puts it.
Two weeks ago, when my youngest announced a school family tree project, it brought me to an anxiety-ridden state. Suddenly, my vision blurred and I felt an overwhelming heaviness – a full-body exhaustion from years of searching, evidence-gathering and a growing list of unanswered questions. Despite this, as I folded the washing in the lounge room, I said to my daughter, “Sure, let’s do it.”
To myself, I thought: How?
Picture a family tree that has healthy branches full of glossy leaves. Each branch represents one’s kin: parents, siblings, aunts, uncles and grandparents. They reach out and up towards the sky, secure in their movements, anchored by thick roots that ground the tree to the earth. But as the tree grows, a new branch from an unknown tree gets grafted on.
That stray branch is me, broken off from a vast system of my own biological roots.
I remember being tasked with my own family tree project as a primary school student. And how, back then, I unquestioningly produced my adoptive family’s tree as if it were my own.
Sandra Moon with one of her daughters. Source: Supplied
Now, as an adult, I know that is not the full picture, and so does my daughter.
She knows the complexities of my life as an adopted person and hers as the generation that comes after it. And she feels the losses of our own flesh and blood: her biological grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins whom she may never meet. We both pay the price of closed adoption – a lifetime of forced family separation.
This time around, when it was my daughter’s turn to tackle the family tree project, we both wanted it to reflect our bloodline.
She knows the complexities of my life as an adopted person and… feels the losses of our own flesh and blood: her biological grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins whom she may never meet
To begin, we collected all the evidence at hand and paired it with anecdotes I have been told by the family members I managed to meet after the closed adoption laws changed when I was 18, but with whom I have since lost contact. We also used an ancestry database that I joined two years ago when I sought answers to my cultural identity.
There were also the documents I collected from more than 25 years of research on my family history. This includes my original unamended birth certificate from the Catholic Adoption Agency when the NSW closed adoption laws changed in 1988, my birth records from St Margaret’s Hospital in Darlinghurst and a few lines from St Anthony’s Children’s Home in Croydon. Back then, even though my biological father’s name was omitted from my birth certificate, I eventually found it out, and managed to locate his migration record from Malta to Australia, which contained my grandmother’s name.
That afternoon when my youngest daughter began her family tree assignment, she became the new driver of the research. She took over the computer, opened the DNA database and studied the one family tree that we could see we had a connection to.
Back then, even though my biological father’s name was omitted from my birth certificate, I eventually found it out, and managed to locate… my grandmother’s name
Soon, she joined a few dots, and in a mere hour-and-a-half, we had a piece of the puzzle connected. She identified my paternal grandmother’s parents and what could be some of their siblings – information I hadn’t known before.
My daughter was excited as she attempted to put the pieces back together – a picture of our history we thought we had lost through the practices and fallout from closed adoption. I wanted to be excited too, but couldn’t shake the feeling of frustration from years of searching and false hope.
From my own research, I knew that family jigsaw puzzles can change in a heartbeat. Before using the ancestry database, the information I’d gathered suggested that I had Maltese and Egyptian heritage. I remember the elation as I learnt this – the huge sense of relief that I finally knew my own cultural roots. Then, after learning more about my paternal grandmother, it seemed more likely that I was Maltese and Greek. But my DNA results surprised me: it said I was Maltese and Sicilian and not Greek at all. Still, that wasn’t the end of the story. Because DNA services for ancestry information update their database regularly, the last time I looked, it had changed yet again and now states that I am ‘Maltese, Sicilian and Greek’.
This perplexed my daughter as she continued to click the keyboard, doing her best to connect the dots and grow the family tree.
My daughter was excited as she attempted to put the pieces back together – I wanted to be excited too, but couldn’t shake the feeling of frustration from years of searching and false hope
It seems that once you have severed a branch it is not an easy thing to just stick it back on to one’s original family tree. As the project went on, this became clearer still. While the progress we’ve made feels like a step in the right direction, only my paternal grandmother’s parents seemed like a new, solid connection. My daughter had hoped for more, but I reminded her that her mammoth effort had brought us a step or two closer to knowing who we are.
For now, we contemplate what we have learnt of our cultural roots through all the twists and turns, knowing one day we will jet off to Malta, Italy and Greece to experience them firsthand.
