Famous Adoptees & Fosterees, Page 3
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Why Such a List?
Because I think it could be a useful resource for adoptees, foster children and their parents. Adoptees and foster children often feel isolated, especially if their families are not open about adoption and fostering or have not cultivated the friendship of other, similar families. Young adoptees, especially where they no longer have contact with the social services, may grow up not knowing any other adopted children, and may wonder whether they are unique. They may be ashamed of their status; they may not feel that they can aspire to high achievement, but are instead doomed to a second-class life. This list should reassure them that they can aspire, that adoptees and fosterees have scaled the greatest heights of achievement, and that being adopted or fostered does not have to restrict one's attainments. So just as there are lists of famous Black people, famous vegetarians, famous chess players, famous West Virginians and famous gay men and lesbians, now there is a list of high-flying adoptees and fosterees.
What Information is Included?
The information given includes, where I have been able to get the data: names, birth and death dates, achievements, type of adoption/fostering involved, and information about contact with birth families. This information is not always readily available, and readers are invited to send me corrections and further information, and of course, new people to include. I have tended to give shorter entries for more famous people, whose biographies are readily available elsewhere (President Clinton, for example), and longer ones for people whose details may not so easily be located. I have also concentrated on information about the persons' early childhoods relevant to their care history; this information is often omitted from other sources, which tend to concentrate on their adult achievements.
Where possible I have tried to include references for further reading. These are primarily to books, magazine articles, newspaper items and Internet sites, with a few audio-visual materials. The Internet sites, chosen either because they are relatively comprehensive or because they are particularly rich in links to other sites or bibliographical references, have all been visited (the date of last verification of the URL is noted), most of the journal and newspaper articles have been read, but most of the book references have not been examined. For some people there are hundreds of possible references, and I have included only a few. I have been more thorough in providing references for lesser-known individuals, on the assumption that for the really famous it should be relatively easy to get more information from public libraries. The references are not necessarily the sources I used in compiling the entries.
Cross references are given from birth names and all other known names, even though most of these are obscure, to the most commonly used name of an individual. Cross references to and from names mentioned in the body of entries are in boldface type.
Disclaimer
Relying on secondary materials for the most part, I have sometimes had to choose between mutually contradictory dates or versions of an event, and I must stress the general unreliability of newspapers, particularly the tabloids, as sources of information. This is not to excuse myself where I have made mistakes, but I cannot be more reliable than my sources. Each entry also gives the date it was last substantively revised.
Other Lists
I have made use of several Internet lists as pointers:
- http://www.cyfc.umn.edu/Adoptinfo/adoptionawareness.html
This was the North American Council on Adoptable Children's National Adoption Awareness Month Guide: Parent Group Manual Part II, compiled and written by Diane Riggs, dated November, 1995. Section 3: "Working with Schools" included a list of famous adoptees and adoptive parents, both real and fictional. It seems (as of 8 June 1999) to have been taken off the Internet. - http://www.canadaadopts.com/adoptiveparents/famous.shtml
Famous Adoptions. Dated 2001, this list includes 28 adoptees, 58 adoptive parents and 5 birth parents, compiled for Canada Adopts! Inc. of Toronto. - http://www.adoptionsolutions.com/parents/famous_adopt.htm
Well-Known Adopted Persons, Birth Parents and Adoptive Parents. Part of the AdoptionSolutions Website, maintained by an adoptive parent couple, who only sign themselves as "Pete & Sharyn." - http://www.aoci.org/pages/info_7.htmlThis is a short list of famous adoptees and adoptive families, of which 14 are adoptees, mounted by The Adoption Option Committee of Minnesota on their Adoption Trivia page.
- http://www.adopting.org/famous.html
Famous Adoptees, Adoptive Parents, Birth Parents. This is one page of the Adopt: Assistance, Information, Support Website. - Well-Known Adopted Persons, Birth Parents, and Adoptive Parents. This list was part of the large National Adoption Information Clearinghouse site. As of 27 June 2002 it seems to have been taken off the Website.
- http://geocities.com/Heartland/pointe/2038/fame.html
This is the Adoption Hall of Fame page of The Adoption Forum site. It includes a list of famous adoptees, birth parents and adopters. - http://www.atrap.org.uk/html/celebrate.html
This is a list of "some serious butt-kickers" from the UK Association of Transracially Adopted and Fostered People, ATRAP. It includes 21 names. - http://www.bastards.org/fun/gallery.htm
This is the Gallery of Adoptee and Bastard Legends page from the Bastard Nation site. (Bastard Nation is an American organization agitating for the opening of their adoption records to adult adoptees.) This is really more for fun and contains mostly fictional characters.
There are inconsistencies between these lists, and my own research has failed to support the inclusion of some of their names, where other reliable sources contradict them.
There are also several books giving biographical sketches of famous adoptees:
- Taheri, Michael S., and Orr, James F. Look Who's Adopted. (Western New York Wares, Inc., 1997).For children aged four to eight. Internet orders. Unfortunately I have been unable to consult this book and cannot give a list of who is included or assess its quality.
- Dever, Maria, and Dever, Aileen. Relative Origins: Famous Foster and Adopted People. (Portland: National Book Company, 1992).For older children. Internet orders. This book contains nearly 80 biographies, all of them somewhat or much longer than the ones given here. I have noted in my References after each entry when there is also an entry in Dever & Dever.
Acknowledgements
The other sources I have used include standard reference works, newspaper clippings, Internet searches, foreign adoption groups and adoption publications, radio and television programs, biographies, advertisements for help in magazines and the like.
I would like to thank all those who have helped supply names and biographical data, including Mary Carroll of Victoria University of Technology; William L. Gage of Geborener Deutsche; Tory Laughland of Who Cares?; Gunilla Andersson of Adoption Centre: Swedish Society for International Child Welfare; Henrietta Bond of the British Association for Adoption and Fostering; Lois Melina of Adopted Child magazine; Johannes Kobe of the Zentralbibliothek Zürich; Bertha Leverton of Reunion of Kindertransport; Chen Jan of the China Foreign Languages Publishing and Distributing Bureau library, Beijing; Claire Jordan; and Linda Savell of The National Organisation for Counselling Adoptees and Parents, Oxford, England.
But beyond my own scanning of biographical material, my primary source has been other members of Adoption UK, a British organization that my wife and I have belonged to for many years. Adoption UK is devoted to the proposition that children need families and that the right family can be found for virtually any child. It exists to advise prospective adopters about how to go about adopting and finding the right children, to help adoptive families with problems which may develop after adoption, and to influence public policy on and increase public awareness of all aspects of adoption. Adoption UK is not an adoption agency and does not place children. But it does publish a bimonthly listing of special needs children who need new families called Children who Wait. Three of our own children we owe directly or indirectly to the work of Adoption UK. In particular I want to thank Pat Swanton, former editor of Adoption Today, the bimonthly journal of Adoption UK.
Roger Fenton
23 June 2000
Last revised: 23 April 2004
