Word: szymczak
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Patricia Szymczak was 36 years old when she decided to pursue a quest she had contemplated since childhood: finding her mother. Adopted in infancy, Szymczak, a reporter with the Chicago Tribune, attacked the task as if on deadline. She knew the woman's name and hometown from a 1953 Illinois adoption decree, obtained when she turned 18 from her adoptive mother. Szymczak called the local post office, found a retired mailman and got him talking about the family -- her family. She contacted old neighbors, who led her to friends. Some had seen the woman, who now lived out of state...
...before tremulously placing the call, Szymczak journeyed to the tiny public library in her mother's hometown 300 miles from Chicago. "My fantasy," she explains, "was to open a high school yearbook and see a woman who looked like me." On page 15 of the 1952 yearbook, Szymczak's fantasy came true. The smile was the same one Szymczak saw in the mirror; the graduation quote: "I'm just the girl you're looking for." The long search ended with a three-hour call from a pay phone. By the end of the conversation, it was after midnight...
According to the North American Adoption Congress in New York City, there are more than 60,000 Americans engaged in quests like Szymczak's: mothers anxiously seeking children they gave up at birth, children hunting for their biological parents. Desperate, obsessive, their searches have, over the past two decades, ceased to be merely a matter of individual effort and have become a national movement. There are more than 450 support groups for searchers. Many conduct meetings modeled on Alcoholics Anonymous, in which new participants rise with the passion of the converted and state their mission: "I'm Sarah...