Primary Sources and the Real Story

When I was young, the strange story of my grandmother’s adoption always terrified me. It was a wound that ran through the generations. My father and his sister didn’t speak of it often, but the pain of it left an uncertainty to all the relationships on that side of the family. What could possibly have made a mother surrender only one of her four children, a daughter who was eleven years old?

I didn’t stop wondering about this as I got older, as I kept trying to tell myself the story in a way that made sense. At some point, I began imagining a fully-formed tale, completely fictional. I was convinced that my great-grandmother’s true motivations and the events surrounding her decision - events that scarred my grandmother for the rest of her life - would remain a mystery, and that any sense-making would rely entirely on my imagination. Still I hoped that between ancestry.com and a bit of research I could create a story that at least seemed plausible.

I knew the name of the North Dakota Children’s Home Society, the agency that handled my grandmother’s adoption in Fargo. Whenever I searched, the society came up under the heading of The Village Family Service Center. I supposed they’d know nothing of what happened a century ago, and so I ignored the link for more than a month.

“Tell her when you see her that (her) mother never forgets her.”

Then in November of 2019, I picked up the phone. The receptionist at the Village Family Service Center surprised me. After I explained I was curious about my grandmother’s adoption, she put me right through to a post-adoption-search social worker who helps adoptees find their families of origin. The social worker couldn’t promise there’d be any records, but she confirmed my grandmother’s name was in the database and offered to do a search. There were documents I had to provide: birth and death certificates and notarized forms that confirmed our relationship. Then one day shortly before Christmas, 2019, the social worker called me. She had letters. Nearly a hundred pages of them, a correspondence between my great-grandmother and Frank Drew Hall, director of the Children’s Home. The letters spanned the years from 1914 to the mid 1930s.  

“It’s so sad,” the social worker commented. Giving up a child is always painful, she added. But this case moved her. And when she forwarded me the letters, it became clear why. For two decades my great-grandmother had tried to contact my grandmother, to let her know she was loved and to ascertain that she was well. But at the time, such contact was not allowed. It was an age, the social worker explained, when “Adoption workers felt it was best for all communication from birth family to their birth child to be severed.” As a result, my grandmother spent her life convinced she’d been rejected by a mother who didn’t love her.

The letters tell a different story.

Through family lore and census records, I knew my great-grandfather died and left my great-grandmother, still in her twenties, with four young children. She pulled the older two from school after about sixth grade and sent them to work full-time. Her youngest two, my grandmother and her little sister, were put into separate foster care homes nearby, where they could visit regularly. The letters to Hall began when my grandmother’s situation changed and she was returned home. Something never mentioned in the letters went wrong, and her mother reached out to the orphanage. She hoped to keep my grandmother in Grand Forks where she could continue to see the family, but Hall explained that was not an option.

Later letters reveal my great-grandmother opened an adoption file on her youngest child as well, but by the time her youngest was returned from foster care, my great-grandmother had begun receiving a widow’s pension. This stipend, paltry by today’s standards, seems to have made enough of a difference for her to keep her youngest and not send her to the orphanage. My great-grandmother never mentioned the stipend in her letters, but a note of it appeared in the Grand Forks Herald on August 1, 1917. I got that information, and lots of other details about the era and the place, from the Grand Forks Historical Society. The staff there was hugely helpful. I communicated with them via phone, email, and a personal visit in the fall of 2019.

From the letters, I learned that the Christmas after my grandmother was surrendered at the age of eleven, her mother sent a gift that was returned by the adoptive parents. For nearly a decade my great-grandmother asked for a picture of her daughter. While Hall was willing, the adoptive family was not. She asked for news on how my grandmother was doing, and Hall gave her encouraging if very few details. Eventually he couldn’t even provide those as the adoptive family moved away, leaving no contact information. What’s clear in the letters is that my great-grandmother regretted her decision almost as soon as she made it, and that it was a desperate choice made because she felt she had nowhere else to turn.

Until I saw the letters, and the notice in the newspaper, I don’t think anyone in my family considered my great-grandmother’s grief, nor the limited resources a woman in her times faced. I’m not sure how my grandmother would have received this information. She’s been gone more than thirty years, and in a way it’s a relief to uncover many of the details of this story – details that allowed me to write a truly fact-based story - without having to face the pain or cynicism it might have provoked in her. But I’m sad she didn’t know she was loved. Perhaps it wouldn’t have mattered to her. Perhaps she would have dismissed the letters and her mother’s version of events as too little too late.

My grandmother never discussed her adoption with me. My father and aunt mentioned it a few times, always conveying the deep pain it had caused. But I don’t remember anyone considering my great-grandmother’s position or viewing her as a sympathetic character. Nor did they consider that she paid for her decision for the rest of her life. Dear Clara is a work of fiction, but it heavily relies on the real story as it was revealed in the primary sources I was able to uncover.

Before the letters, her voice was silenced.

But no more.