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"A Family Tradition for 128 Years" PORT PERRY STAR - Tuesday, March 7, 1995 - 5 Local man traces roots to find mother he hasn't seen in over 30 years... ROOTS By Jeff Mitchell Port Perry Star THE SUN WAS beating hard on the pavement of a Port Perry parking lot on the July day in 1990 that Rik Davie met his wi YE He was 37 years old. The emotional meeting at the Railroad House Motel between the Nestleton man and the woman from New Brunswick was the culmination of more than two months of intensive searching, digging, and | subterfuge. And it was an example of how, by using | : all the resources available and a few that perhaps shouldnt have been, a man can, if he has the strength and persistence, trace his roots through the dusky channels of the adoption system in Ontario. "I felt like I was meeting somebody I already knew," Mr. Davie says of the meeting now. "She is probably the nicest woman you'd ever want to meet. And she's been beating herself over this for 30-odd years. "It's a real sense of closure; I had no sense of roots before." His story is both common and uncommon; he, like many adoptees, discovered after years of living with a family that he was adopted, not the natural-born son he had always thought he was. What's unusual is that his search was begun and concluded within such a short time frame. ; | Mr. Davie will tell his story next Tuesday night at a meeting of the Parent Finders, a Durham Region group that assists adoptees with tips and emotional support as they search for the roots they desperate- ly need to fill in the blanks in their lives. He will tell them how to make a guarded system yield up the facts they need, and urge them to have the courage to forge ahead through a process that is emotionally draining, and often frustrating. RIK DAVIE'S MOTHER 1ay on her deathbed in a hospital when his world was suddenly disassembled before his very eyes. He was involved in a dispute with an aunt over the settlement of his mother's estate -- his father had predeceased her some years before -- and was taken aback when the aunt told him he deserved less input | than he thought. He pressed her, and got her to admit only that there was a family secret, the details of which she | At the age of two months, the child became a ward of the CAS. He was placed in a couple of foster homes, and developed into a healthy, happy toddler. On Jan. 31, 1955, he met the couple who would become his parents. He was a year and a half old when he was legally adopted. "It's impossible to describe how you feel when you sit and read that," said Mr. Davie. passed in 1987 when the system was put in place. There are some lucky ones, but they are few. They are the people whose birth parents have registered with the ministry in the event their children ever come looking for them. In those circumstances it is up to register workers to make contact with both parties and, eventually, arrange for a meeting. "If you are one of the lucky ones and a match is already here for you, it takes a couple of months," she said. "Using rough numbers, it would look like one in 10is a match." It's sometimes a difficult job, with searchers faced by the same gaps in chronology that adopt- ees find so frustrating. An&the number of cases is mind-boggling. As of December 30, 1994, some 41,000 people | were registered as conducting active searches. | The majority, roughly 25,000, are adoptees. The remaining 16,000 are relatives, mothers and siblings. "We get an average of 400 applications a month, and that's held steady over the past two years," said Ms Kent. THERE IS A move afoot to amend the rules governing the information that can be given adoptees conducting searches. Bill 158 was presented in the Ontario Legislature in the form { of a private member's bill during the current NDP | government's regime. It has received two read- ings in the Legislature, and was passed by a com- mittee review process. past December, it was delayed. Time ran out on Bill 158, and the legislature went into recess. Now, no one knows if it will see the light of day again in the waning days of the current govern- ment's mandate. "Bill 158 would change things, in some cases, policy branch with the Ministry of Community and Social Services. : In effect, the blind background adoptees are now entitled to would be fleshed out more; they would have access to their original birth information, including the names, occupations, and addresses «8! of their parents. "What (adoptees) have asked for is the same right everybody else has," said Ms Belford. She added, however, that much of the information could not divulge. Perplexed, he phoned the Adoption Disclosure and Social Services. It was confirmed that he had been adopted as an infant in the 1950's. He confronted his mother with the information, and she admitted to him he had been adopted; she sup- plied his last name -- Armstrong -- but few other details. He realizes now that had he not asked his sick mother about the circumstances surrounding his childhood, she never would have volunteered the information. "She was going to take it to her grave," he said. "My father already had." At once, feelings he had had throughout a turbulent youth in Toronto made sense. He had always felt someth- ing of an outsider in his own family; he drifted through life without a sense of permanence or real purpose. Suddenly, "You're not who you think you are," he said. "It's all gone. "The very basic things you thought... are just entirely stripped away. "Imfgine: The reasons why you're like you are don't exist a ore. All those basic things are gone, and there are no answers." SO HE WENT looking for them. With the constant aid and support of his wife, Linda, Mr. Davie applied to the Children's Aid Society in Toronto to find out his "blind background", the non-iden- tifying information which, under current legislation, is all agencies involved in adoption are allowed to give out. It is deliberately vague, designed to protect birth parents from detection if they wish it to be so. He learned that his mother, a native of Nova Scotia, had come to Toronto at age 19 and was working in a law office when she hooked up with another maritimer and was involved in a ceremony she took to be marriage vows. n she was pregnant. hon her life fell apart. She discovered she had not been legally married, and her husband was a married man with two kids back home. Alone, pregnant, and desperate, she turned to the Salvation Army for help, and on Oct. 24, 1953, Richard Murray Armstrong was born at Grace Hospital in Toronto. 3 Rik Davie of Nestleton met his birth mother, Jackie, at age A RP : 7 after mounting an intensive search. Next Tuesday, he tells Registrar of the Ontario Ministry of Community |," 0r't0 Parent Finders. Call 686-7840 for information. DE SPITE THE non-identifying nature of the information provided him by the CAS, he had an ace in the hole -- a surname, provided by his adoptive moth- er. He conducted a search through the Salvation Army's archives, and got more information on his family in Nova Scotia. His grandfather, for instance, had raised hunt- ing dogs. He phoned the Canadian Kennel Club looking for information on the man, explaining, not entirely untruthfully, that he was working on a family tree. He also got hold of his mother's first name -- Jackie -- through what was likely an error on the part of an archivist at the Salvation Army. The information from the Kennel Club helped him pin- point a small town in New Brunswick near the Maine border. He called an Armstrong there; it wasn't one of his relatives, but he knew of other Armstrongs in a village nearby. : On a Friday afternoon, contact was made with the pro- prietor of the general store in the tiny maritime town. "I said I was born in Toronto in 1953; I'm looking for my mother," Mr. Davie recalled. He reeled off more of the facts he had been able to glean through his research. And the man reluctantly said, "I think you're talking about my aunt Jackie. I think you're my cousin." A message with Mr. Davie's phone number was relayed. "Twenty minutes later, a woman called," said Mr. Davie. "She said, 'This is Jackie. I'm your mother." It was 6:05 p.m., two months and nine days from the time the search had begun; Mr. Davie was on the phone with the woman until after 10 o'clock that night. One week later, they met in Port Perry. COLETTE KENT manager of central services and registrar with the Adoption Disclosure Register, understands the frustration adoptees feel when they mount searches for their families. The nature of the information they are given by the register is vague, she admits, but dictated by legislation would be dated by the time it is released, and wouldn't pave a road directly to a birth mother's door. But it would help. She added that while there is some support for revisions to the current legislation, it was formu- lated in the 80's with the right intentions: It was based on the principle that information should be sup- plied with the consent of all parties involved,-and a recog- nition that, sometimes, people want to kéep the past buried. . "There used to be a lot of shame connected with both aspects of adoption," said Ms Belford. Single mothers were stigmatized, and infertile couples were an oddity in a society that revered home and family above all. "Also, there were situations that were pretty tragic," she added. Incest, rape, and other circumstances led to unwanted pregnancy, and often giving children up for adoption was the only way to heal the wounds, she said. "There are these kinds of sensitivities you're still trying to protect," she said. The task of determining willingness to meet would be made simpler if all parties involved registered with the ministry, said Ms Kent. "The more people we get to register, the more voluntary matches we can make," she said. "Every time we get a reg- istraion, we increase our chances of getting a voluntary match." WHILE HIS SEARCH has been completed successfully, Mr. Davie -- who now hosts his mother and her husband at his Nestleton home an aver- age of three times a year, and travels to New Brunswick to visit when he can -- feels for those who are still searching, and are hampered by legislation he says is too restrictive. "I can go down to the registrar's office and pay five bucks and get records of your divorce, and find out all about you," he said. "(But) I can't get records of my own adoption. "The politicians are not going to give us access to this stuff until we stand up and demand our rights. "It's okay to want to know who you are," he added. "It won't alter the way you feel about your (adoptive) parents. They do the job, they get the title. "You've got to know. It's too big a void." But when the bill came up for final passage this - dramatically," said Joan Belford, an official in. the