Searching Out Mr. Pretties' Mom's Birth Family...

... remember that most excellent box of old photo albums Mr. Pretties brought home last week? Well it also contained Mr. Pretties' Mom's adoption information which we'd sort of forgot about. Mr. Pretties isn't sure he wants to pursue any of it, but, you know me I'm all about it.

I don't know which is more interesting to me, the search and destroy... err... rescue aspect or, the actual mystery family aspect. Hmm... does anyone really need more inlaws? Actually I only have sister-in-law/brother-in-law and I think I've been pretty fortunate with them, maybe that's a sign that I need some. Unfortunately Mr. Pretties' mom passed away of cancer in 2003 so she can no longer pursue this adventure with me, although she had been actively searching for her six known siblings since 1991 and had made some fairly impressive headway including meeting one brother and corresponding with a sister.

I don't think MPM (Mr. Pretties' Mom, okay?) story is a typical adoption scenario. Or maybe it is, I'm no adoption expert here... Her birth mother ended up having seven children in twelve years and gave them all up for adoption between newborn & 2 years of age. Her and her husband(s) didn't keep any of them for various reasons. I don't believe these children all have the same father either. So this wasn't one or two children put up for adoption due to finances, etc... or a whole gaggle of kids put up for adoption at the same time due to circumstances, this was just sort of bizarre. Get married, get pregnant several times, have a few babies, put them up for adoption asap, repeat... I believe there were three husbands, so three different groupings of children... Wow...

I just happened to type in MPM's birth surnames in Google (Let me take this time to tell you, honestly, I could happily marry Google.) and the first result to show up was another lady looking for her father's family from this same union! Awesome! I was so friggen stoked I couldn't type fast enough, and if that weren't enough the stinkin' website made me create an extensive account before it would let me proceed with my message. That was a big exercise in patients... which I already knew I didn't have... her last message was posted in 2005 and she last visited it in Nov/07 so she could very well have a different email address/contact info and I just couldn't take that chance. So... I did what any rational yet slightly stalkerish person would do. I emailed her from the website. I messaged her from the website. I replied to her post on the website. I checked out her user profile which happened to have her real name in it, so, I looked her up on Facebook ;) I then proceeded to message every single person with that name (very common name) asking them if they were this lady. I got it right on the second tried! We're going to speaking on the weekend,or, I guess she'll be speaking with Mr. Pretties... yeah... since this is his family and all and I'm just being nosey... sometimes I get too involved in things, can you tell? Everyone's just lucky Mr. Pretties doesn't come home from work tonight to me having a cup of tea with his birth cousin on my back porch. I've been known to interfere like that.

I really wanted to include pictures in this post, I was even going to test out my picture of picture photography skills but I'm not sure how Mr. Pretties and his sister would feel about this stuff being plastered all over a public blog... So just imagine some really cool adoption paper pictures, some correspondance, and me stalking someone on Facebook :)