[phder]

Hi all - Have just come back after a while and made some progress in my search - or maybe not! For some strange reason, it never occurred to me that the nonid info. from the adoption agency would be anything other than accurate! (duh :-) Now, after two false leads from a searcher and one possibility still open that she didn't find - a cousin found me - but the woman and her husband have passed away so it will take DNA evidence (which her daughter has agreed to) to confirm - and more reading the forums - I have begun to appreciate what a big crock of you-know-what stinky stuff the nonid info might be! I'm curious what others have found though - my searcher thinks that most of the time the info. is more truth than fiction, but I am not so sure. Did they even do anything to verify the woman's age or name? In my case, the truth is probably more like what many others have discovered - infidelity and deception, and little of what is in the agency info may be true. But after a year and a lot of ups and downs, I am going back to step 1 and petitioning for my original records. If the name, at least, is correct with what the searcher told me, at least I won't have completely wasted the year, and there might be more info. to confirm or refute the one remaining possibility. I have no clue why I was so taken with the agency info - except that it was a nice story I wanted to believe - I am usually way more skeptical! Ah well, it is nice as always to realize that I am not the only one in this boat and I wish you all best of luck. Have thought long and hard about whether I really want to know the truth and all the possible outcomes there might be to this search, and every time the answer is yes - partly because as a scientist I know the power of genetics and the relevance to making informed health care decisions, and partly because I just want to know darnitall! Don't need for her to be/have been a 'paragon of virtue' - but as others have said, even in the absence of a maternal relationship for whatever reason, sometimes siblings or other relatives prove to be a source of connectedness we might not have expected. I can say that, whatever the outcome, I have encountered many wonderful and caring people that I never would have known existed otherwise. And that, perhaps as much as anything, has made the effort well worth every minute!
Sunshine,