FOUND

Two adoptees offer a joint memoir of looking for their birth parents.

Teacher, musician, and photographer Craig-Evans always wanted to know her origins, and her friend Diggins, a designer and writer, wondered about the health history of her biological family. Both were curious if they’d ever met their relatives as strangers, without knowing it. In 2015, when they were both in their 40s, they decided to team up to investigate these questions, and they share their adventure in the pages of this book. The pair started with DNA tests and online searching but ended up sometimes relying on friends and volunteer “search angels”—people with experience at finding birth relatives. Because each set of parents didn’t get married, the authors located two distinct biological families for each of them. Once they'd obtained names and contact information, they proceeded slowly, afraid of the reaction they might receive. Craig-Evans found a mother who was eager to connect and a father who did not want his family to know that he had another daughter. Diggins discovered that her father had lived a short, tragic life, and that her mother was reluctant to tell her own family about this fact of her past. After detailing the searches, the authors include four annual updates on their families, as well as the experiences of six other people who set out to find their own biological parents. Overall, these stories make for a dramatic reading experience, and they’ll be informative for other adoptees who may be considering investigating their own origins. Craig-Evans and Diggins engagingly reflect on many adoption-related issues, such as what creates a sense of connection, or why people choose to accept or reject a biological bond. The alternating points of view of the two authors render some of the material repetitive, but, on the whole, their book effectively shows the rewards and risks of the process.

An intriguing account of a search for biological kin.