Should I contact birth father?

Hogie22

Hi all,

Firstly, thanks to everybody for their contribution to this forum. It’s been a really valuable and encouraging resource to me over the past few months.

At the moment I’m looking for a bit of advice. I’ve looked at the tracing guides on here, gone up to Dublin and found my original birth cert. My birth was registered twice, firstly without my birth father’s name and the second time with it. Luckily enough, he has a random name so I’m pretty sure there’s only one of him in the country and I’m 99.9% sure that I’ve found him. From the pictures I’ve seen on the internet there’s even a physical resemblance, which was amazing to see!

Unfortunately my birth mother has an extremely generic name. According to my non-identifying information she also emigrated to the US shortly after I was born. I know this because my dad provided me with all the info he had and has even encouraged me to begin a trace.

I’m on the contact preference register and I’ve contacted the agency I was adopted through. I’ve heard nothing back from the contact preference register apart from a confirmation email and from the adoption agency they’ve told me that due to the current legislation they’re still not in a position to provide adoption related services. As you can imagine this is extremely frustrating. I’m 24 years old and the more time ticks by, the more I’m aware of the family I’m potentially missing out on. I’d love to hear opinions on whether I should send a registered letter to my birth father, as I found his address online, or not. Ideally I’d prefer to go through the correct channels, dealing with a social worker etc, as I think this would prepare everybody involved, but I’m afraid that this may take too long and this is not something I’m willing to have regrets about in later life.

Any opinions/advice is hugely appreciated!

tyview

Hi Hogie22,

I didnt have to send a letter myself as the hse eventually got working on my case and found my bm within 2 weeks. (BTW, she had a very common surname too so don't be under the impression that it will be impossible)

I did think long and hard about what I would say in a letter to her and I had decided that a kind of generic letter was best asking her to contact me and signing it with my birth name in brackets so she would know who i was. You can give your email address if you think theres a risk of him showing up on your doorstep. If your birth father put his name on your birth cert I would imagine he knew your birth name and pretty much acknowledged you as his too. I've never heard of this for a child that was given for adoption. As for sending it registered post, I would tend to agree with you about that.

Best of luck!

rinsjwind

Hi Hogie

If the agency isn't in a position to help with tracing or making contact with your birth father, you could try your local HSE adoption service or barnardos run an excellent adoption advice service and have (I think) recently been registered for this service with the adoption authority. The AA will give you contact details.

OR

You could try getting hold of another application form for the contact register and just send that to your birth father to see if he takes the hint???? If he does register then that changes everything, I think they might have to at least try and find birth mother as well before contact goes ahead so you might kill two birds with one stone! The AA also run the register so you can ask them how it operates, their freephone is 1800 309 300.

Lastly, trust your instinct to go with some form of mediation at least to start with, this is a big step and while a "solo run" might work out OK, there also a lot of ways to mess it up and having someone around who does this stuff for a living isn't a bad idea.

Good luck!