I was born in Portland, Oregon, on Tuesday, April 16, 1929, to a woman whose name I do not know. Somewhere in a file drawer at the State, there is a piece of paper with her name on it, and mine, the first name she gave me, if she gave me one. I am seventy years old. I have never been allowed to see it.

This is my page about that piece of paper.

About Me

I was adopted at three months by Fred and Leta Matz, who had a small dairy outside of Salem and had been married four years without a baby. They drove to Portland on a Tuesday in July of 1929 and brought me home in a laundry basket on the seat of a Model A. My mother told that story every birthday I ever had, except she always left out the part about Portland.

My only baby picture On the front steps of the farmhouse, summer of 1929. A white bonnet, a white blanket, and my father's big hand at the edge of the picture holding me steady. Before July there is no picture of me at all. My grandson says he will scan it for this page when he comes home at Christmas.

I found out I was adopted the summer I was twelve. A cousin said it at a family picnic, the way children say cruel things without knowing they're cruel. I ran all the way home across two pastures. My mother sat me down at the kitchen table and told me the truth: that they had wanted a baby more than anything in the world, that the agency in Portland had called, and that they had picked me. That night my father came in from milking and didn't say a word. He just put his hand on my head, and that was his whole speech, and it was enough.

They were good, loving parents, and I want that understood before anything else on this page. Wanting to know where I came from has never once meant I wanted different parents. I didn't start looking until both of them were gone, Daddy in 1970 and Mother in 1981, because I didn't want either of them to think for one minute that they hadn't been enough.

I married Thomas Carrasco in 1950. We had three children, Diane, Arthur and Joann, and now there are six grandchildren and one great-grandbaby on the way. I managed school cafeterias in Salem for thirty years, and if you went to school here between 1955 and 1985, I very likely made you eat your green beans. Tom passed in 1994. I learned the computer last winter in a class at the senior center, from a patient young woman named Debbie who never once raised her voice at me, and this page is my final project.

Why I Want It

People ask me, at seventy, what difference it makes. Here is my answer.

My name. Did she give me one? Did she hold me and call me something for the three months before I went to the Matz farm? I would like to know what it was, even if I never use it.

My medical history. Every doctor I have ever seen has handed me a form that asks about heart disease, cancer, diabetes and strokes in my family, and every time I have written "ADOPTED - UNKNOWN" across the top. When my daughter Joann found a lump a few years ago (it was nothing, thank God), the doctor asked whether her grandmother had had breast cancer, and Joann had to say, "Which grandmother? We don't know." My children and grandchildren deserve to know what runs in their blood. So do I.

My own story. Everyone else I know can say, "My people came from Norway," or "My grandfather homesteaded near Burns." I have a laundry basket and a Model A. It's a good story. But it starts in the middle.

I'm not looking to make trouble for anybody. If my birth mother is living, she would be nearly ninety, and I know that she may not be. If I have brothers and sisters, I would like to meet them, if they want to. If they don't, I will send a card at Christmas and leave them be.

Measure 58

For as long as I have been looking, an adopted person born in Oregon could not get a copy of his or her original birth certificate, the one that was made out when we were born, with our birth mother's name on it. After an adoption, the State made out a new certificate with the adoptive parents' names on it, and the original was put away under seal. Mine is in there somewhere.

In November of 1998, Oregon voters passed Measure 58. It says that an adult adoptee may ask the State for a copy of his or her own original birth certificate, the same as anyone else may get a copy of their own. That's all it does. It doesn't open the court files. It doesn't make anybody meet anybody. It gives us the paper with our own beginning on it.

I voted for it. I wore my good coat. I am not ashamed to say I cried in the booth.

Then, before a single certificate was handed over, a lawsuit was filed to stop it, and Measure 58 has been held up ever since. As I write this in September of 1999, the courts still haven't settled it. Not one of us has gotten our paper.

The other side. I want to be fair about this, because they are people too. The suit was brought by birth mothers who say that when they gave up their babies, years ago, they were promised that their names would be kept private forever, and that the State can't go back on that promise now. Some of them have husbands and children who don't know. I understand that. A girl in trouble in 1950 was sent away to have her baby in secret and told to go home and forget, and to never speak of it again. Some of those girls did exactly as they were told, for fifty years. I don't blame them, and I would never come knocking on a door where I wasn't wanted.

But here is how I see it. Nobody asked me what I wanted in 1929. I was three months old. I didn't sign any promise. It is my own birth certificate, the record of my own birth, and every other citizen of this State can walk into the office and get theirs. And the birth mothers I have met in my group, the ones who are searching for the babies they gave up, almost every one of them says the same thing: nobody promised me anything. They just told me to forget. They never forgot.

I don't know how the judges will decide, and I'm not going to pretend I do. What I know is that I'm seventy, and the State of Oregon has my name in a drawer, and I would like to read it before I die. I am being as patient as I know how.

My Search So Far

The agency. In 1982, after Mother passed, I wrote to the agency in Portland that placed me. It took them seven months to answer. What they sent me was one page of what they call non-identifying information. My birth mother was nineteen and unmarried. She was of Norwegian and English descent, a high school graduate, and worked in a laundry. She was described as "tall, fair, quiet, and fond of music." My birth father was not named. That page is in my Bible, and I have read it more times than some of the Psalms.

The State registry. Oregon keeps a voluntary adoption registry. If an adoptee and a birth parent both sign up, the State can put them in touch. I signed up in 1983. Nobody on the other side has ever signed up for me. I renew my information every time I move, which is not often, and I check in once a year to make sure they haven't lost me.

The newspapers. This is my winter project. The library has the old Portland newspapers on microfilm, and the papers printed birth announcements in 1929. Two afternoons a week I sit at the reader and write down every baby girl born in Portland between the 14th and the 18th of April, 1929, with the parents' names. I know a girl in my birth mother's situation would not have been in the paper. But if my birth was recorded with the others, or if she went home and later married and had more children, a name might turn up somewhere twice. I have forty-one names in a spiral notebook and a crick in my neck.

My group. Once a month I drive to a meeting of adoptees and birth parents who are searching. We meet in the community room of a library, we bring cookies, and we help each other with the hard parts: which county records are open, how to write a letter to an agency, what to do when you find someone, and what to do when you find out it's too late. Some of them have their own notices on my Other Seekers page. Please look at it. One of them might be yours.

What I'm hoping for. If the courts let Measure 58 go ahead, I'll be at the vital records office the first morning they open the door, with my cane and a thermos of coffee and my birth date written on a card in case I'm too nervous to say it. And then I'll have a name. Hers, and maybe mine. Then the real search can start.

If you were born in Portland in April of 1929, or your mother or grandmother was a tall, quiet nineteen-year-old who worked in a laundry and loved music and went away for a while that spring, please write to me. I would be glad of any letter at all.

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Last updated Monday, September 20, 1999
I am not a lawyer. If you have questions about your own records, ask the State or an attorney.