[MilehighDad]

Due to our girls' individual pasts, openness with their birth parents is clearly not in their best interest. However, with our oldest, I did make contact with her aunt to request pictures from when she was young and to see if they wanted to have limited contact (letters at Christmas and birthday). However, over the last five years, they have gradually stopped any contact and it really hurt our oldest.

Now, I'm on a quest for pictures again. Our daughter that just moved in has a total of about 10 pictures from before she moved in with us, plus about the same number of Heart Gallery pictures. Her last foster mom took almost no pictures, although we did get 4 or 5 from her. She says that's all that she has from 2.5 years. We contacted a previous foster parent through email where she was placed for almost 4 years. They did send 3 pictures, all of which include either foster mom or foster dad in them, but have not responded since. The other two we got from her file.

So, I've run out of possibilities except for one. She was placed for adoption a year ago with a family out-of-state. She lived with them for a month before they disrupted, packing her things overnight to wake her in the morning and tell her she was going back immediately. This family has a unique name and I happened to look up the name and find the mom in Facebook. The question is: should I contact a previous failed adoptive placement to see if they took any pictures of her that she can have? How would they react? I know they must have broken hearts over not being able to keep her, but should I respect that and not even contact them? She was horribly wounded by the experience and I'm not even sure I would get pictures that we would decide to give to her. (We did give her the other fp's pictures, but it did bring up a lot of issues. They were supposed to adopt her, too!)

I wouldn't even be in this quandry, but she has so few photos! We've definitely been successful in adding to her collection a bit, but it's still not much. After you're done crucifying me for suggesting this, does anyone have any other ideas to track down pictures?