The Invisible History of the Human Race

by Christine Kenneally

  One reason why it’s so hard to understand the sense of rootlessness experienced by the former residents of the group homes is that most people live their lives firmly embedded in a web of information. They know where they were born. They know whether their parents loved each other. They know what it looks like when an adult brushes her teeth. They belong to interconnected groups, whether a family, a neighborhood, or a religion, and they have experiences that constantly reinforce what they know. Together these bits and the threads that bind them add up to an incalculably crucial body of information, providing not only a history but also a sense of self. It’s almost impossible for most of us to imagine not knowing such facts about ourselves, and yet this information was effectively erased from the lives of the children of twentieth-century orphanages.

  One “ex-orphan” told me that these former group-home children want, like any other citizen, to have information about themselves and their family—or its proxy—and all the power that such knowledge brings. Yet there are enormous obstacles to obtaining it. In Australia records are scattered throughout each state, held by government records offices and by the religious institutions that housed children. Government departments may take years to respond to a single request. Many records were destroyed, but there’s little clarity about what was lost and what was never kept in the first place. Many files are undated, sloppy, or incorrect, and there is no consistency in how files are searched for or delivered. There’s no central organizing body, and most people need professional-grade archivist skills to find and understand the documents. Generally the ex-orphans distrust bureaucracy, and while it is intimidating enough for them to enter a neutral institution like a public records office, many must return to the actual organization that mistreated them. The overzealous application of privacy laws also means that when many care leavers do manage to receive files, their missing siblings’ names are redacted. One ex-ward received a photo of a children’s party with all the little faces at the table whited out except for his own.

  In forty-eight of the United States most citizens are not only given automatic access to their original birth certificates but also protected by privacy laws so no one else can see them. But this doesn’t apply to children who are adopted. At adoption their birth records are sealed, and a new certificate is issued with the names of the adoptive parents. Unless the birth parents have explicitly signaled consent for the adoptee to contact them later, adoptees in many states cannot gain access to their records without paying hundreds of dollars and getting a court order. Even then, adult adoptees who petition for access may be denied, and if they are successful, many states differ in what information they will provide.

  In Texas and South Carolina adoptees are legally required to have counseling to deal with the possible emotional consequences of learning who their birth parents are. In Connecticut it is against the law to release any information that might assist in the identification of birth parents if a third party (such as the agency that initially placed the child) feels it would be disruptive to the adoptee or to the birth parents. In many states it is possible for birth parents to block the eventual opening of the record. In Minnesota in 2008, twelve hundred adoptees were unable to gain access to their basic birth information because of an affidavit filed by their biological parents. After all the social change of the 1960s, after the gains of the civil-rights era, after laws were passed making it illegal to discriminate against women and people of color, adoptees are the last group of American-born citizens who are denied straightforward access to this fundamental information.

  Naturally, when information can be retrieved, even the most banal detail of a stolen life can be traumatic. “People get rotten drunk in order to read their files,” one activist told me. In a government report one woman described opening her files at home alone and being committed to a psychiatric ward a week later. Others put the files away and never look at them.

  Ivy Getchell went searching for information about herself at state government offices in 2004. Getchell was taken from her family by social services as a young girl and spent years inside the Parramatta Girls’ Training School, an old convict prison, where leg irons and wristbands were still attached to the walls. While she was at Parramatta, Getchell’s “name” was “Fifty-five.” It wasn’t until she was seventy-one years old that she felt able to start searching for the records of her life. Her father was long dead, but she found a file of letters from him that she hadn’t known existed. He wrote:

  Ivy, my little mate, for Christ’s sake answer my letters. Let me know where you are. I will come and bring you home. We miss you and love you. We have a nice house now up at old Kelly’s place near Mount Bathhurst. You will remember it. Ivy, I have a job. I can help you. Please let me know where you are.

  • • •

  I met Geoff Meyer in 2012. With his Fair Isle sweater and slicked-down hair, he looked like anyone’s seventy-six-year-old grandfather. He was courtly and jokey, and he called me “mate.” He said that not long after he had run away to Sydney, “I started to get it into my brain to find out if I had any family.” He guessed that the best place to look was the Department of Child Welfare. “I’m a state ward,” he told a young man at the local office. “I’m looking to see if I’ve got a mother and father.” The young man went into another room and after five minutes returned and said, “I think you might have a sister.” He disappeared again to check further, and then an older man came out and said to Meyer, “I think you had better leave.” Meyer thought he had misunderstood. “I think you had better leave,” the man repeated. “No,” said Meyer. They argued back and forth, the man continuing to try to dismiss Meyer with no explanation and Meyer refusing to budge. Then the man told him, “Get out, or I’ll call the fucking police.” Meyer was frightened of being sent back to his foster mother, so he left.

  He got a job, married, and had four children and, as the years passed, eleven grandchildren. Meyer never told any of them that he had been a state ward. When his own children asked him about his childhood, he changed the subject. But when he retired, he started to go to the state records offices to see what he could find. Even then he didn’t tell his wife about his past. “It felt very, very private,” he explained. He eventually tracked down his birth certificate and discovered that his mother was Maisie Aileen Meyer, a Sydney local, and his father was Leo Joseph Meyer, an American sailor. There was no information about why he had been made a state ward and no record of contact from his parents. As he continued his search for records about his life and family, Meyer was told different things by different departments. Some officials were kind to him, while others were perfunctory. One said his information had been lost in a flood; another claimed it had been destroyed in a fire. At the records offices Meyer had to insist that he was legally entitled to a copy of his files. When he received them, they took months to reach him and were often missing documents from the original sets he had seen.

  When he was sixty-eight, Meyer saw a newspaper notice seeking former state wards. He responded and shortly after found himself at the head office of the Care Leavers Australia Network in Sydney, speaking with one of its founders, Leonie Sheedy. “She started talking to me, and I talked, and then the more I talked the more she was getting out of me, and I had never talked like this before.” When Meyer left Sheedy that day, he said, “I felt like Superman walking in the air. I felt like Jesus Christ walking on the water.” That conversation reframed his life. “I thought I was the reason all that stuff happened,” he explained. “All that time, I thought it was only happening to me, but it was happening all over the place.” When he got home that day and told his wife about his experience, she asked, “What really went on in your life?” So he began to tell her too.

  Over a cup of tea Meyer showed me the files he had recovered. The first item was his intermediate school certificate. He found other records about his education and his foster parents, but he could locate only one from before he was ten. He spen
ds a lot of time now searching for the missing records of his first decade; they are proof of an otherwise invisible life, but he also wants them so he can sue the government for compensation.

  The likelihood of Meyer’s finding his files is remote. All over the world the funds devoted to preserving records and archives are being cut. Of course, the fewer funds that are available, the more endangered are the records that do remain.

  In 2012 an Australian state ombudsman revealed that his local government had committed hundreds of breaches of records-management legislation. He discovered that a single department was in possession of eighty linear kilometers of children’s home files, most of them uncataloged. Some were stored in basements with dripping water and rat infestations; others were illegally marked for destruction.

  While freedom-of-information acts in most Western English-speaking countries may grant people like Geoff Meyer access to their records, information that has not been indexed can never truly be free. The care leavers suspect the governments are suppressing files to avoid being sued. Perhaps, but bureaucratic apathy achieves the same ends.

  The last time I saw Meyer, he told me that he had discovered a distant cousin on his father’s side in the United States through Ancestry.com. His new cousin told him that his father had returned to the United States and died young. Later Meyer’s mother and another man also set sail for America. Their ship berthed in California, but there the trail went cold.

  Meyer wondered for a long time whether he actually had a sister but never found a trace of her. He now believes the young man at the records office got the spelling of his name wrong. Meyer told me he’d had three heart attacks but he always woke up happy, thinking, Another day! He would keep looking for his files. What he wanted to know most of all was whether he’d been surrendered or taken. If he’d been surrendered, he reasoned, maybe the person who’d turned him in was a relative. Maybe it was a sister of his mother, maybe she had children too, and maybe he had more family. Still, he said, “I’m seventy-six. How long do I have to find out?”

  • • •

  Totalitarian power thrives when it alienates people from basic information about themselves. When European slavers abducted people from Africa, they essentially took away their history as well. It was a profoundly dehumanizing act that occurred because the system treated the individuals who were caught up in it as less than human. In Canada and Australia in the early to midtwentieth century, many indigenous children were taken from their communities and raised in settlers’ families or group homes. This act has since been described not just as abduction but as cultural genocide.

  Other regimes have specifically targeted historical and family information for destruction. In 1924, when communists were in power in Mongolia, they destroyed family trees that had been kept for generations and banned indigenous surnames; for more than seventy years locals simply called one another by their forenames. In 1998 the government decreed that Mongolia’s citizens must rediscover and register their surnames and their fathers’ names. But by that point many people no longer remembered them.

  In North Korea today in the songbun system of social organization, party and local administration officers track the ancestry of all citizens, but they don’t share that information with the country’s people, who may well have lost personal knowledge of it. A family connection to a dissident—be it a close relative or a distant ancestor—will block a person’s access to some jobs, to education, to party membership, and even to food.

  In Mao Tse-tung’s China, the leader’s view of genealogy was initially benign, until he began to feel threatened by the established power of traditional clans. Baiying Borjigin, a Beijing native of Mongolian descent, began to explore his family history at the beginning of the twenty-first century, eventually writing a book about his quest, Searching for My Source. As a child in Beijing, Borjigin was told that his family was descended from Borjigin Temujin, otherwise known as Genghis Khan. Indeed, Borjigin was the name of the clan into which Genghis Khan was born. Yet before he could investigate his connection to the ancient warrior, Borjigin had to deal with the fallout from the recent dictator.

  I met with Borjigin, who is now in his seventies. He told me that his family entered China many generations before he was born, and most of his Chinese ancestors were buried in a long-established family graveyard in a beautiful forest outside Beijing. The last members of his family to be buried there were his father’s parents, who contracted tuberculosis. At that time, Borjigin wrote, TB was seen as a terrifying pestilence, so his grandparents were sent to live out their last days in a residence inside the family graveyard. There they were looked after by a peasant family that was paid to maintain the cemetery. Borjigin’s father was sent to stay with relatives.

  When Borjigin was six, the Chinese government reclaimed the land of his family graveyard, and his family was told to remove the bodies of its ancestors. One memorable night Borjigin watched his father and other relatives bring many strange clay-covered objects into the house. He peered from behind a door to find them washing the clay from objects made of gold and silver with emeralds and other precious materials. When he asked his father about it, he was told, “This is no business for children!”

  Later Borjigin’s great-aunt took him to the public cemetery where the remains of his ancestors had been reinterred, now without their funerary treasures. She told him that it was his birthright to be the keeper of the family’s memory. “You are the first man-child of your family, and you are very obedient. Everyone else can forget our family grave, but you can’t,” she said. “You must often add some earth to our family graves when you grow up.”

  But the message changed again in the mid-1960s. Like many other Chinese, Borjigin’s family was forced to turn its back on its history with the onset of Mao Tse-tung’s Cultural Revolution. By now the family fortunes were so reduced that they were regarded as urban poor, yet in the eyes of the regime their background relegated them to the “exploiting classes.”

  During the Cultural Revolution, young people all over the country banded together in Red Guard groups. They harassed and terrified the citizenry, invading their houses and looking for evidence of membership in the malcontent bourgeoisie. If the Red Guard found jai pu (ancient family history records) or other evidence of ancestral power, they would destroy it on the spot and quite possibly kill the residents of the house as well. Borjigin’s family no longer swept its family tombs or looked after the graves, as even those behaviors were regarded as “evidence of the restoration of reactionary life.” The worship of ancestors and other old customs were forbidden. “It was very dangerous,” Borjigin explained to me through a Chinese interpreter. “Family had to destroy itself.”

  Some families buried their jai pu, others hid them in walls, and some destroyed them before the Red Guard could. One day, as the Red Guards searched houses down the street from Borjigin’s, his father told him to find any documents that might reveal their family history. They gathered the deed to the family graveyard and the map of its graves, which held more than forty ancestors from over ten generations. Each ancestor was accompanied by a painted portrait and a description of his or her position in the family tree. Dozens were officials in the Qing dynasty. Just one of those paintings, Borjigin knew, might lead the Red Guard to beat his entire family to death. He and his father found a large basin, and Borjigin placed all the documents inside it and burned them. His great-aunt and his father forbade him to ever mention the family graveyard or his family history again.

  Borjigin was fifty years old before he was told the names of his grandparents. In 2000 he went looking for the family plots he had seen decades before. There had been a great deal of urban encroachment in the area, yet the site that Borjigin had visited as a child still looked familiar. The graveyard had, however, since been turned into a vegetable plot for the nearby university, which employed peasants to farm it. Borjigin’s companion asked the peasants if they knew the pl
ot had once been a graveyard. They said it had been a vegetable plot as far back as they could remember, although they did often come across human bones when they were digging there.

  Standing where the graves were once marked, Borjigin was sad but also embarrassed about his sentimentality. Long before his family had become wealthy and then poor again in China, they had lived and died in the deserts of Mongolia. Their bodies went into the sand where they died, and they never expected their descendants to worship them, he thought. Now his ancestors were fertilizer in this soil. “The meals and bodies of the elite of modern China, the teachers and students of the national university, were improved. This was the best final result, wasn’t it?”

  Borjigin told his father before he died that he was going to reconstruct the family tree. His father replied that he had never regretted selling their jade and antiques and paintings but that he thought every day about the family tree they had burned. “If you can restore this list,” he told Borjigin, “I will rest peacefully when I die.”

  The current Chinese government has supported its people’s reverence for their heritage. China’s largest libraries, the National Library of China and the Shanghai Library, have hundreds of thousands of family genealogies. “The clans are back in full force,” one researcher told me. “Some of them have two to three hundred thousand members and they are fairly flush with money and all about preserving the family.” Now the government doesn’t persecute people for their family graves. It charges them rent instead.

  There has been a similar resurgence of interest in family history in Eastern Europe. Some researchers suggest it’s a reaction to the void left by the regimes that were overthrown in the 1990s. “They yearn to reconnect to their family, to their roots,” one observed.