Family Finding: Making Connections

Can you imagine growing up without knowing your parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and siblings?

Growing up in foster care is difficult enough, but growing up in foster care without knowing your real family can be traumatizing. There are a number of children in the foster care system that do not speak with anyone in their family or from their past, which can lead to feeling as though no-one cares about them. Especially during the holiday season, foster children can feel alone and depressed, particularly when they don't even see as much as a card from their relatives.

A Family for Every Child's Family Finding Program helps to reconnect children with their estranged family members, as well as past mentors, teachers, couselors, neighbors - or anyone else who has been a positive influence for a child. By cultivating these important connections, foster children are able to learn about their past and other family members.

Foster children are then able to experience the satisfaction of not just being cared for, but being cared about. This allows many teenagers and young adults to move beyond foster care with a strong support network and connections they can keep with them forever. Moreover, such connections give younger children the opportunity to eventually be placed with family members or other potential care givers connected to their past.

This leads to children feeling less displaced, making them more stable in adulthood. By offering valuable contacts and arming a child with information about their family and where they came from, they will achieve a greater sense of belonging.

 Winter Wonderland Annual Event

November 3, 2011 

Valley River Inn

In the Willamette Ballroom

from 5:30pm to 9:30pm

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 Success with Family Finding

When it comes to Family Finding, "success" looks different with each and every case. Family members calling a child on his or her birthday is a grand success as is placement for children. As long as a child is reconnected with positive influences, or simply connected with new relatives, success has been achieved.

About a year ago, a case was referred to Family Finding in which an 11-year-old boy, Damien*, was searching for family members. He had been removed from his parents' home, could not have contact with his mother, and had been in foster care for years. He was expected to be in foster care permanently, and the state had no intention of him ever being placed with a family.

Family Finders worked tirelessly to find old connections for Damien in his old files, on the Internet, and through calling other relatives and connections. Eventually, a meeting was held in which it was decided to get the family together and discuss Damien's case.

In searching for family members, family finders saw that Damien's father's behavior had significantly improved, and he had graduated to unsupervised visits with Damien. Damien expressed his desire to live with his father.

Now, almost a year later, Damien is happily living with his father in a permanent home, where he sees family members frequently. Due to the hard work of our family finders, Damien was able to start a new life with his biological dad, and escape the foster care system from which he was fated to age out of.

*name has been changed

Woman Trying to Find Brother 

By Charles F. Trentelman

Standard-Examiner Staff

10/9/2011

OGDEN -- The only thing Tammy Roberts knows for sure about her brother Michael is that he was born in September 1970 at St. Benedict's Hospital, now known as Ogden Regional Medical Center.

She has a picture of herself holding him when she was little. She posted the picture on Facebook with the note: "Here is proof that Michael does exist."

She feels a need to show proof because the picture is all she has. She can't locate a birth certificate. She can't find a birth announcement in the newspaper. Her mother wouldn't talk, and her two younger siblings barely remember Michael.

But Michael exists, or he did in 1971, the last time Roberts saw him.

"I believe Michael's somewhere in Utah. That was his first name. I don't remember a middle name."

Roberts lives in West Valley City. In 1971, when she was 9 and living in Ogden, she and three of her siblings were put in foster care.

The reason is still a little vague, but apparently involved neglect.

Now she's trying to bring all of her siblings together.

"My mom and dad are both deceased, so it's not like it's going to bring up hard feelings or old memories for them dealing with it," she said.

"Because they're both gone and I just felt like it's something we need to do, we have to complete our family."

She found one brother and one sister in August by using social media and the help of "adoption angels," people who are expert at finding the families of adopted children.

She has a brother, Brian Wayne Jolley, living in West Valley City and a sister, Anita Kay Uden, living in Lehi.

But Michael is being a problem.

All four children were born to Fidella Chappelle and Delbert Wayne Butler in Ogden. The family lived on Wall Avenue, and Roberts remembers her grandmother living nearby. Why were the children take from their parents?

"There were actually stories in the Standard. I remember at one point my gramma on my dad's side ... she let me read articles that were in the paper about neglect."

She has been unable to find the stories, "but I do remember physically reading an article that was handed to me."

Her parents were divorced in 1970. About six months after Michael was born, which would put it in 1971, her three siblings were adopted while in foster care. She was not.

"We went into foster care, and eventually, they were adopted. I never was because I was the oldest and they didn't think I would do well in an adoptive family because I was older and I would remember."

She did remember, and still does.

"I had a lot of different families so maybe that wasn't the best thing," she said. "I would have preferred to be raised by one family, and that didn't happen."

Because she was in foster care, she kept her own name.

"After I was married, I reconnected with my (birth parents), and my children all knew them as Grandma and Grandpa," she said.

"But my brother and sister never had contact with them, never had anything to do with them. At one time, I mentioned to my mom that I was registering with adoption sites, and she got really upset with me.

"She said, 'That's part of my life I want to forget. That's the past,' and so I let it go."

But not anymore.

She found her parents' original divorce papers. They show her mother was pregnant with Michael, due in September 1970. She thinks that may be why there is no birth announcement in the newspaper: If her parents were divorced before the birth, Michael was born to an unmarried woman, and some newspapers didn't announce those births then.

"I wrote to vital statistics to try to get the original birth certificate to see if it would give a middle name. They sent me a letter saying there was either no record or I'm not entitled to a record."

Michael would be 41 now. He might not be named Michael anymore. He probably has a different last name. She hopes he is still in Weber County but has no evidence that he is.

"Since we were born in the Ogden area, I thought that would be the best place to put the word out," she said.

"We were all taken away when I was 9. They were younger, and the baby was just around 6 months old, so they could have changed his name in the adoption.

"We just really want to find this last sibling, because it's been 40 years. I remember every one of them. I remember each brother and sister."

And of Michael, that memory is all she has.

It Takes a Village and We Need You!