#52 Ancestor Challenge 2019- Week 2, Birthing Parents

#52 Ancestors Challenge 2019 - Week #2 
Prompt: Challenge

Birthing Parents

The  Rev. Dr. Cynthia Forde

Finding ancestors is always challenging for genealogists, but helping adoptees find their birth parents is a greater one.  Most adoption records are sealed.  Adoptions are usually shrouded in secrecy.  The rights of the birth parents, who wish not to be found, is considered inviolable.  The rights of the adoptive parents, who do not wish their adopted children to be discovered, is even more sacred.  The rights of adoptees have not been validated until recently, and only a few states recognize the adoptee's rights.  Yet, most adoptees want to know, “Who am I?” 

As a pastor, I hear the stories and validate the pain of those adoptees longing to know from whence they came, despite having had good homes with loving adoptive parents.  I have been fortunate to assist several adoptees in finding birth mothers, and on rare occasions, I have been able to find a biological father.  One of the most rewarding discoveries was finding birth parents that eventually married each other. That is rare!  The couple went on to have three sons, but they never forgot their baby girl, that had been adopted!  When their biological only daughter found them, a joyful reunion became like all Christmases and birthdays rolled into one.   

After retirement from the ministry, I turned my genealogy hobby into a profession.  I do still hear adoptee stories that invoke my compassion to help birth the birth parents.  

T's story is just one such challenge.  She is a delightful woman I have known since she was a teenager; T was adopted in 1950 at four months through a branch of Lutheran Social Services into a loving family.  After she had raised a family, T wanted to find her biological roots; she had completed DNA testing with 23 and Me.  I encouraged her to test with Family Tree DNA and Ancestry.  I uploaded her raw results to the third-party tool, GEDmatch.com. We had all of the bases covered.  

The Ancestry site produced a first cousin match to descendants of an Italian immigrant, Pasquale Baratta, from Omaha, Nebraska.  1920 U.S. Federal Census, records show Pasquale Baratta was born 1 Feb. 1902 in Vinchiaturo, Campobasso, Molise, Italy and emigrated to the United States in 1919. On  3 August 1924, in Omaha, Douglas, Nebraska,  Pasquale married Louise Baratta, born 26 January 1909 in Italy; she emigrated in 1922; they may have been cousins because they share the same surname. 

Louise and Pasquale “Patsy” are enumerated in the 1930 U.S. Federal Census, Omaha, Douglas, Nebraska, living at 3501 30^thAvenue in a home valued at $1800.00. They were naturalized citizens, able to read and write.  He was a laborer working for the railroad.

Pasquale “Patsy” and Louise Baratta had six children, four sons and two daughters.  One son died shortly after birth.  Determining which of the five remaining children was the biological parent was a challenge; Autosomal DNA does not tell us if a match is to a female or a male.  The oldest son, John’s descendant, is a first cousin to Trudy, eliminating John as a possibility to be Trudy’s biological father. The youngest two sons, Joe and Frank, were eliminated because of their young ages in 1950.   We focused on the oldest daughter, Delores, born in 1931, and the second oldest son, James Joseph, born 30 January 1929, who died in 2010, as the only two probable choices for biological parents.  The youngest daughter, Rosemary, was born in 1937, but she was too young to have been her birth mother.  Rosemary is the only surviving child. Trudy bears a resemblance to a photo of Rosemary.

A Christmas present arrived in December 2018 when Ancestry provided a very close first cousin match to a woman who had indeed given a baby daughter up for adoption; the baby girl was named Patsy.  Evidently, James was unaware of the pregnancy.  He was married as well.