Touch A Heart - Mend A Heart: A Valentine's Day outreach
How would
you feel if you received an email from someone you didn't know, someone with nothing to gain financially or otherwise, telling you that she or he had found a possible match to your search information? And how would you feel if
you were the one who found a clue to the answer to someone's dream?
There are adoption sites all over the Web with guest book and registry entries from adoptees, birthparents, and other birth family members seeking reunion. Details are posted in the hope that someone will recognize a small tidbit of information and heal what Susan Cunningham Lasky, co-owner of the
Adoptees Internet Mailing List (AIML), calls a "hole in the heart" caused by the absence of a birth family member.
You could make a dream come true This Valentine's Day, you could help mend a heart! Perhaps someone is searching for you. Perhaps your own search has turned up information that could help another. Perhaps you have a resource or skill to share. Or maybe, you would simply like to pass along a message of encouragement to an anonymous face in the adoption family.
Anyone can do it All members of the adoption community are welcome to participate - you don't have to be a searching adoptee or birthparent. It's really quite simple.
- Select a mail list, newsgroup, adoption site, or registry that you've never visited before, and read through the entries.
- Of course, if anything looks familiar to you, you know what to do!
- If you have advice, or a specific resource to recommend, send it along with your Valentine's wish.
- If nothing looks familiar, and you have no information that could help, send along a Valentine's wish anyway, and a note to let someone know they aren't alone.
- Don't forget that you can always pass along a link to the adoption site right here. We're building a comprehensive resource for US, Canadian, and other international searches.
Places To Start Here are some suggestions to get you started if you don't have a particular site in mind:
- Our Reunion Registry. Our registry here at the site has thousands of entries from adoptees, birth parents, adoptive family members, birth family members, and others. Solicitations by professional searchers are not welcome.
- Adoptees Internet Mailing List Guest Book. With entries primarily from searching adoptees and birth parents, the list owners are encouraging visits from as many seeking adoptees and birth family members as possible. Solicitations by professional searchers are not welcome.
- Visit other Mail Lists and Newsgroups or Registries and Listings and pick one or more related to your own search.
- There are also many state-specific registries and listings, which can be found at Search/Support Resources by State.
- Select an adoption Web Ring and follow it from site to site.
- Consider joining our Search Angels. These volunteers offer their time and talents to help others search.
Whether you find the one you're looking for, are found, share a resource, offer to make some phone calls or visit a library, or just pass along a friendly wish, yours may be the message that keeps someone's hope afloat.
And by the way,
Happy Valentine's Day!
Home
Add Your Comments!
We want to know what you think. Your comments are important to us and the other readers. You are what makes this site special.