“It is sometimes only through these secondary sources that the little details of an individual can be learned. ‘He had a beautiful singing voice’; ‘she had bright red hair’; ‘he loved animals’; these kinds of details—not present in the ‘hard’ data—humanize our ancestors and breathe life back into what is otherwise merely a name on a record.”
Time is running out for parents and children and brothers and sisters who were torn apart by the Holocaust to actually be reunited. This is the story of a little girl who was placed in an orphanage in Russia in 1941, the father who never stopped searching for her, and the cousins who reunited the family.
My parents never spoke about where I came from or the circumstances involving my adoption. They had no records pertaining to my birth parents… Then I read that the government in Toronto, Ontario, where I was born and raised, had opened up its adoption record archives allowing adoptees to request copies of original records.