Trying to find a person used to involve hiring private detectives, but the internet has changed that, at least for the basic tracing of a person. Everything you find is reliant on the quality of the information that you have to input, and whether the person you are looking for has taken any basic steps to become anonymous.
Tracing my mother’s side of the family was very easy, mainly because they weren’t trying to hide, and in some cases were actively seeking me. They were listed on Genesreunited, which offers searches of the Births, Marriages and Deaths Register, for only £5 per 50 searches. An alternative seems to be Ancestry.co.uk which offers unlimited searches for a monthly fee, although I haven’t personally used them.
From there I seem to have got the birth details of most of my family. I put seem as although I’m 99% sure, there is always the possibility of a coincidental birth, especially in areas where large quantities of people with the same surname live. An example is Rollinsons in South Yorkshire, of which there seem to be a lot, but very few are inter-related.
Once you have found names etc, the next step is to try and access the Electoral Roll, which generally means travelling to the main library of the area you want to search. There is however a cheap, and easy option, available from home via the internet. Onlinesearches.info offer affordable access to the electoral roll, with a variety of easy single month subscriptions, with no recurring charges. Another prominent site is 192.com, but it’s fees are quite simply extortionate, so I would advise giving them a wide berth (they make the UKInfo Disc software also, which I’m fortunate enough to have picked up in a charity shop for £5!, unfortunately after I had purchased a months access from OnlineSearches.info)
I purchased the one month Unlimited Electoral Roll Search by Full Name, for a very cheap £4.75 for 30 days access. This allowed me to look up the Rollinsons, and try to cross-reference with the BT Directory Enquiries, and I seemed to have got a few good leads, but all went no where (although it’s surprising how many people you ring and it turns out they are trying genealogy too). Of course curiosity won out, and I also entered everybody I knew into the search, just to see if they were listed!
Information is a useful tool, and it’s important that you use that information wisely, and some might say that I haven’t used it that wisely, but I’m only acting (or not acting) upon the information that I’m presented with. If people don’t want to allow access to these kind of details, then they need to take active steps to opt out of the electoral roll, just as they might do with BT’s Directory Enquiries.
Having all this information at my fingertips has become something of a burden, and although I’ve approached each person with total honesty, and good intentions, I’ve still been badly burned to some degree, by some of them. I’ve therefore decided to take my friend Richard’s advice, and leave well enough alone. I still have questions that I would like answered, but what effect might those answers have on me and my family? I don’t need to slip back to the old Prozac days, and the last month or so has dragged me back to the edge of the abyss, that is severe depression, as I’m sure my friends have noticed. I’ve tried my best I think to keep a positive outlook, but I guess the old rejection monster keeps rearing it’s ugly head, now and again.
That ends today. I will leave the information about my search for my birth relatives online, and if any one should stumble across it and want to leave a message, without it being published, then they can leave a comment, but put in the first line - NOT FOR PUBLICATION
Today I finally feel as though I’ve gotten over being adopted, and that the search is truely over.