This is a very condensed version of my experience.
In 1952, my husband and I married and started our life together. I was 18 and he was 21. He was one of 10 children. After 18 months, our first son was born. In the next five years and 11 months we had two more boys and one girl.
Fast forward to 1963. My husband's sister was 2 years younger than he. She had mental problems and was in and out of a mental hospital for a year or two where she met an alcoholic man 35-36 years older than she. He was also in the hospital for treatment. They married and had twin boys on September 3,1965.
Within a year and a half, the parents got to the point they were unable to care for the twins and a foster parent couple who had been trying to help "mom and dad", called my husband and explained someone had to intervene. Guess who?
For nine months we were legal guardians of the boys and had intended to raise them.
With our four, who had just begun private schooling in 1966 and the addition of the twins, we were looking at a long time of raising and educating 6 children. That educating included at least a bachelors degree. We had always talked 16 years of schooling to our four.
We were farmers and the farm economy was not at it's best.
In conversation with an older half-sister (twins Dad's 1st marriage) who contacted us and explained she could understand the abandonment of the boys by daddy, and wanted to help us out by adopting the twins, to add to her two sons. We agreed.
The sister, who was fromoTexas, took the boys and raised them. We next heard from them when Hal graduated from high school in 1984. Contact was never made after that invitation was sent.
Until... I was going through old papers and guess what? I found the old invitation and began a search on "Beenverified." In less than 8 hours I was in conversation with Hal. Beenverified had found him, an address, a phone number, a career, a family, etc.
For the next hour I talked with Hal when I could stop crying. I had searched for these boys for all this time. How grateful I found them.
The family is planing a family reunion this summer and my prayer is that the boys will come and we can become reacquainted.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR PART IN THIS REUNION. GOD DOES ANSWER PRAYER, HE SURELY ANSWERED THE ONE I HAVE PRAYED ALL THESE YEARS.
I called the beenverified.com customer service/support phone number. I was greeted on the phone by Timothy who was incredibly supportive and very courteous to me. I let him know that I was a paralyzed veteran living on a very tight budget with only a fixed income to work with and that I was calling to cancel my subscription to the beenverified.com service. I let him know that my cancellation wasn't due to any dissatisfaction with the service, it was simply a matter of my being capable of paying the fee due to my limited income. I also shared with him my story of using the beenverified.com service to be able to locate and make contact with my biological parents after I was put up for adoption almost 50 years ago right after birth. I told Timothy that I had attempted to use other means to locate them after my adoptive parents had passed away, as I had promised them to wait to find my biological parents after they had both died. My adoptive mother, or simply my mom since she chose me to adopt shortly after I was born, had passed away after my adoptive father had died in 1997. I started to think about finding my biological parents about 10 years ago, but didn't really make much of an effort to do so until my primary care doctor at the Seattle V. A. had asked if I knew of anything about biological parents because as she noticed I was getting close to 50, she felt it would be helpful to know of any hereditary health concerns that may have been passed down to me. It was about the first week in March when I made a genuine inquiry to locate my biological parents. I had watched two tv talk shows which had successful stories of adoptees finding their biological parents without knowing anything about them. The TV shows I watched both posted phone numbers of those who had tracked down the biological parents of many people seeking to find their biological parents and I called each of the phone numbers that were posted at the end of each show. I soon found out after my first call that they were offices of attorneys with private investigators used to try to locate and make sure the information was accurate and even promised to provide a means to contact the biological parents to their clients. Well, there was one small detail that I wasn't informed of until the end of my conversations with both offices that had been very successful in this process, that small, or actually large detail was the cost of their services, which one office quoted me a $400.00 fee, with installment payments that could be made if needed. I called the second office and received a quote of $600.00 and of course the option of paying in installments. I discovered that I wasn't in any financial position to afford these "professionals," to locate my biological parents. I then started to contact the Oregon State bureau of vital statistics and they let me know they could mail me a certified copy of my "pre-adoption birth certificate," if I answered several questions that only I would know the answers to and a $20.00 money order to send into their office. A short time later, around February I received my certified copy of my "pre-adoption birth certificate," which identified the names of both of my biological parents and knew the next step in finding them would require some sort of "pertinent information," of some relevance to their names to locate where or if they lived somewhere close to my birthplace. So, this is when on or about March 6th or 7th I signed up with beenverified.com and was actually able to find both of them and they were both still alive. WOW! I had the phone number and address of my biological father that I used to make the first call to my biological father and he told me that I had an older sister and older brother and called my sister to get my biological mother's phone number as he indicated they had divorced shortly after I was born. So, the bottom line is that without your service I would probably be a very frustrated paralyzed veteran without the financial means to get the information needed to locate my biological parents, and I don't think I would have enjoyed a very emotional conversation with my biological mother who had last seen me after giving birth to me and placing me up for adoption almost 50 years ago. I can only say THANK YOU SO VERY MUCH FOR YOUR HELP! It was indeed a positive experience that I will never forget. Thanks for everything, including being kind enough to extend my beenverified.com services for free until 6/7/15. Keep up the good work, you never know if you may have done this for others and perhaps weren't even aware of how valuable your service has been. A very happy customer with a one in a lifetime experience that has meant more than words could describe!