How does one really go about finding a sibling that’s been adopted out? Like, almost 40 years ago?

In around 1970, my mom gave up a baby boy for adoption. It was what happened back then, to families like theirs. It was a scandal, right?

A few years back, Mom asked me to help her with figuring out how to locate the child. She’d written it off for ages, with the thinking, “why would he want to know me?”, but she was feeling better about it and was ready to look.

We got all the information we could together, but it wasn’t much. We contacted the place of birth, and the organization that assisted with the adoption, and registered with them.

Nothing ever came up. It’s been 7 years almost, and nothing has come up. Because of the ways the privacy laws work, there doesn’t seem to be much more that we can do. If the child (child, he’s almost 40!) registers with them as well, they are supposed to contact us, but what if he doesn’t have the information to do so? What if he wants to find her, but just isn’t able to? On the other hand, what if he doesn’t? We don’t know that either.

I guess all we can hope for is that someday soon, there will be one single online clearing house registry for all adoptions. Right now, there are so many I don’t even know which one to start with.

Here, I’ll put out what we do know, so that maybe if he ever googles it, he might find us:

Birth date was January, 1970 in Portland, Oregon. Birthname was probably Michael Earle. Birth mother Karen. White Shield, Waverly and Trillium were the involved organizations.

Any takers?