To Anonymous Comment on Mayflower descent

There are probably hundreds of thousands of people who are descended from the Mayflower and would like to "claim that descent" as my anonymous commentator said.

Although I was adopted in the era when any knowledge of my background was jealously guarded (even my original birth certificate was falsified with a wrong name for my mother), there is one way which can unlock many of the secrets of adoption. It is the way I found my natural family.

In many states, if an adoptee can present to the probate judge in the district where they were born, a certificate signed by a doctor saying that said adoptee has an inheritable medical condition which could be passed on to any children, most likely the probate judge will order that the original family should be found so that medical information about the family as a whole can be passed on to the adopted person.

In my case, a probate judge in Chicago ordered that my family should be found based on a doctor's signed note that I had bi-polar disease. My genetic family was found in a matter of weeks. The cost to me was in the $600 range. I found a brother (and his wife and two children), an uncle and four first cousins and their children in 2001. I am still in touch with many of them, particularly my brother and his wife. One of my cousins is into genealogy and took my maiden (adopted) name and showed me how I was related by blood, through my natural maternal grandmother to my adoptive father who had a Mayflower heritage reaching back to William Brewster

The irony for me was the fact that the doctor who sent the letter to the judge and other doctors before him had lied. I am not bi-polar. But because of their lies, I found my roots.