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I was adopted as an infant from the Republic of Colombia. I currently reside in New Jersey and would like to know how a young adult such as myself may go about locating my adoptive mother. I has been something I have wanted to do for quite some time but I feel I am emotionally and mentally mature enough to go about the search now. My only concern would be finances.
For starters: What have you learned from your adoptive parent/parents? Surely, they must know something. Hopefully, they were good enough to fill you in on all that they know.
To be quite honest with you the reason I came to this forum is my parents never wanted me to search for my biological parents, especially my father. He was very controlling of my mother, and while my mother began encouraging me to embrace being adoptive, my father shunned it. I love my mother - she is a hard worker and provides for the family but my dad is a controlling ignorant man who takes advantage of my mother's work ethic and brings in pretty much nothing.
I want to avoid asking my parents and keep them out of it because they will make it all about them, which is why I came to this forum. I have a copy of my birth certificate and original passport at least.
Do you mean you have your US post-adoption birth certificate? If you have your original Columbia certificate then you'd have your birth parents' names.
Were your adoptive parents US citizens at the time of the adoption? If so, there should be naturalization papers on you, as that's how it's handled when citizens adopt a foreign baby. Contact the Dept of State and get copies of your passport application and your naturalization papers. The documents may have names or clues. If they were Columbia citizens and the family came to the US at a later date after your adoption, then those papers wouldn't be of help.
It was a closed adoption because my adoptive parents did not want my biological parents to ever have contact with me. I have my original birth certificate, it is in Spanish. For some reason it does not list my time of birth (maybe that is how it was like in 1989?). My parents have all my adoption files and have always made sure I did not have access to them. They have stated to others and myself in the past that they knew about my family excluding my birth father. They knew nothing about my birth father but that my birth mother put me up for adoption and I have three older brothers. My adoptive parents were and remain U.S. citizens at the time of the adoption.
With the aforementioned said, would who [job title] at which specific department would I contact? Would it be in my home state (New Jersey) or at the federal (US) level?
Tell them you want to see a copy of the application for your citizenship.
Phone numbers to ask for a copy of the application for your passport: travel.state.gov/passport/npic/npic_898.html
You want the applications, not the actual documents. They may or may not have helpful information about your birth.
Thank you for providing me with the aforementioned links. Do you feel I will have any difficulties in acquiring the applications? If and after I obtain the applications, what are the next steps I should take?
That's why I gave you links that included phone numbers. You need to talk to a live person, and they can either help you or send you to the right person to help you. Ask all your questions of them. It shouldn't be difficult at all to get the documents once they tell you how to do it. People get other people's documents through the Freedom of Information Act all the time, so getting your own documents should be pretty simple.
The hope is that the applications will have some clues for you, as to exactly where in Columbia your mother lived, maybe even her name, and other details of your birth and adoption. There is no guarantee of this... you won't know until you see the documents... each adoption situation is different. It's a matter of collecting pieces of your puzzle.
Just be aware that even with information on your birth parents, there's still no easy way to find them when you are sitting at your computer and they are in another country. The searchers here can't help you with that. We don't have online access to documents from other countries.
Your reality is that your best bet is to get the info from your adoptive parents. I know you don't want to do that, but maybe in time the conversation will be easier with them. Your dad is acting the way he is because he's feeling hurt and insecure about you wanting to know your birth parents. To them, they are your parents and they cannot imagine it any other way. Be empathetic about their feelings, reassure them it doesn't change how you feel about them and how grateful you are for the good life they've given you, but you still have a need to understand from where you came.
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