Christmas of 2021 I found out the truth about my birth, before being adopted. I have found both sides of my adoptive great grandparents families in Lebanon. I mainly used social media to find the families as all Lebanese records are not on Ancestry or any other search engine. I have met so many of my Lebanese relatives its hard to keep track of all my cousins. I have really gone out of my way to work on my birth family tree, and I have really succeeded. My birth woman did not know where her grandparents even came from, or her own grandfathers first name. Nor did she know what town her grandpa came from. She had many old photos of her Lebanese family and she had no idea who any of them were. I was also given copies of some of the old photos. The birth woman knew literally nothing about her Lebanese side, as her grandmother died when she was just turning 11 years old. Her mother was American, and her Lebanese grandma did not approve of her full Lebanese son marrying a Non-Lebanese.
My cousin Susan and I are related because her grandmother and my great grandmother are first cousins. She is in contact with most of her family in Lebanon. They knew about me being born, and they knew that my Lebanese grandfather did not want me given away. The story goes that he was planning on leaving his family and taking me back to Lebanon to be raised by him and his extended family. He supposedly had it all planned and was ready to leave the USA until his wife, my grandmother had another plan.
I have to go back in time for a minute and tell you about something I had found accidentally while searching. I found two birth records for myself from the State of California. One shows my name as if I was not adopted, my now known birth father's surname with my name being "Tina Marie" which was originally Athena Marie, changed by the nuns because it sounded too ethnic. Then my birth woman surname as the mother, which is an unusual surname because it is a Lebanese name. I also have a second birth record showing my adoptive parents surname and the name I was given by them. This pretty much proves they kept me and took me home after I was born, and it makes sense the stories I heard from my own birth woman that did not make sense until finding the second birth record and hearing this story from Lebanon that I was almost raised there.
I was shocked to learn this, the thought of being raised in another country when I didn't even know I was part Lebanese to begin with. That I was kept by my own birth family only to be dropped off later on and placed in the adoption pile, sickly and distraught as an infant. What kind of person does this to their own, and by the way first grandchild? My own maternal grandmother, when my grandfather was away at work, took me and dropped me off I was told, to be given away to Holy Family Adoption Agency.
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