Julie Thompson Anneberg has always known she was adopted.
“I never really remember being told. I just grew up, just knowing I was chosen,” as an infant in 1963 by her adoptive parents, Merold and Richard Thompson of Hoquiam. They felt blessed to adopt her from the home in Tacoma because they believed they could not have children.
At 16, she was joined by a baby sister, Joelle, who was born in 1979. It had never crossed her mother’s mind that she could have a child, Anneberg said. It was so off track that her mother was afraid she had ovarian cancer, she said. A friend suggested maybe she was pregnant.
“I loved it,” said Anneberg. “I was ecstatic to finally get to have a sibling … so excited to have a sister.”
Her adoptive parents have been supportive of her quest to find out more about her birth identity.
Through the recent search for her birth family, Anneberg discovered the existence of more siblings in her birth family — a half-sister and a half-brother. She just met the older sister, who is a year and a half older than she is, in a telephone call to Nevada where her sibling works as a CPA for the Nevada state Legislature.
Anneberg graduated from Hoquiam High School in 1981 and earned a degree at the University of Washington. On a trip home from Seattle, she got reacquainted with Jim Anneberg, a 1984 graduate of Aberdeen, who was living in Portland. They married 15 years ago, now live in Edmonds and have two daughters, 13 and 10 years old.
She worked in retail for a while, then returned to school to earn education credentials. She now teaches in Shoreline.
Though she had periodically wondered about her birth mother and family she was content not to know. At 50, she began to think about aging and health issues and wondered who her birth family was and what their history could tell her.
“You might have some health issues and you kind of need to know,” she said.
Back on Grays Harbor to celebrate her 30th high school reunion in 2011, she discovered that classmate Cindy Strom Wakefield was part of Northwest Search Angels, a group of volunteers, “wonderful, wonderful people who help adoptees find help to find biological parents,” Anneberg said.
Anneberg and Wakefield found what is known as “non-identifying information” that was then allowed by law to release from the home for unwed mothers in Tacoma where her mother gave birth to her. Her mother’s name was blacked out, but some of the uncles and an aunt were revealed.
Wakefield went to work and found more details. It wasn’t until state law was changed to allow adoptees to seek their birth certificates that the search revealed full names. Wakefield, an advocate for more information about adoption, testified on the bill’s behalf. It passed in July of 2014.
Anneberg had already sent in her request in May. She was one of the first to receive the certificate. Within hours, Wakefield provided a detailed family tree.
“All of a sudden the little piece of the puzzle of my entire life was now real,” Anneberg said.
Her mother now had a name, Marjorie Holland. Her birth family came from Boston. She even discovered she had a great-great-grandmother named Julianne.
Her mother moved west and worked in radio and advertising in California.
There are possible clues in the father’s information. Known only as L.H., he was a sergeant in the Army who served as a paratrooper in the Korean War. He was listed as married with a child.
“He was married at the time,” said Anneberg. She inferred she is an “affair baby,” she said. There is a half brother, too, for he had a son at the time.
No one knows how Holland came to have her baby in Tacoma. She apparently moved back down to San Francisco to return to her work in broadcasting.
The news revealed sadness, too.
Her birth mother had died at 39 of ulcerative colitis that turned into cancer. The uncles and aunt were also deceased. Anneberg had been 13 when her mother passed away, so there is no way they could have connected.
With the gift of knowledge, though, when she and her children go to the doctor she can fill out a family health history that once was left blank.
“Anything medical is so important,” said Anneberg.
Then she got a message from Wakefield, “you are not going to believe what I found,” the genealogist told her.
On a call to a cousin, Mary Holland, Wakefield spoke of Anneberg and said she would be in touch.
Holland was perplexed. Marjorie Holland’s daughter Julie had already been in touch, she explained to Wakefield, and had met some of the family back East.
But this “Julie” was from Colorado.
Thus, Wakefield discovered Anneberg had an elder half-sister, and her first name was also Julie — Julie Waller. (Anneberg was originally called Maureen, but the Thompsons changed her name to Julie.)
Her birth mother apparently had a girl 14 months before Anneberg was born. She now resides in Nevada. Deterred by family vacations, sisters Julie and Julie met over the telephone last weekend.
“My conversation with Julie was amazing. We spoke for (more than) two hours! She told me a LOT of things that I surely didn’t know and I even told her a few things she didn’t know! … We were comfortable with each other from the very start,” Anneberg wrote in email.
“We have the same outgoing personality so speaking with her and vice versa was a breeze,” said Anneberg. According to Holland’s yearbook, their mother was known for being chronically late. “I had to laugh at that one since that has always been something I’ve had to work on,” Anneberg added.
Their mother “was everyone’s favorite aunt and friend because she was so outgoing, charismatic and ‘always the life of the party’,” Anneberg noted. “I’ve been told that a time or two in my day as well.”
Her sister has six children and her twin daughters are about her oldest daughter’s age. “They are soccer enthusiasts, just like my girls. Hopefully, they’ll connect in the not-so-distant future.”
To find a birth family
Here is the website where you can fill out the form to request more information about the birth certificate: http://ift.tt/1oAuIbP...
Wakefield uses Ancestry.com to climb family trees.
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