Shalon Hoyle's Blog – December 2014 Archive (3)

"Good cause" is a very broad term.  In order to have my father's adoption record unsealed, we would have to show "good cause."  An example we were given is "you will face imminent death due to medical concerns if the file is not unsealed."  Well.....that wasn't exactly our issue.  We do have our share of health issues, as well as physical and intellectual disabilities in our family, but that was not the reason we wanted the file.  Obtaining that file would acknowledge that my father had an…

My grandfather was from Plymouth, Indiana.  It said so on his death certificate and on Iowa census records.  My dad's brothers said their father was from Indiana and had a sister that had stayed there.  The adoption file office in Des Moines stated that my grandfather was from Plymouth, Indiana.  When we searched, we searched in Indiana.  We found nothing.  This didn't surprise us, after all, Charles Brown is a very common name.  We contacted a woman at the Marshall County Indiana…

When I decided to start hard core research, I was lucky enough that my dad's half sister had quite a bit of information on their mom's side of the family.  Within just several weeks, I was able to trace my grandmother's maternal side back to the late 1600's - Van Houten and Duselder.  Everything was well documented and pretty much just laid out in front of us.  Her paternal side posed a bit of a problem.  Her father died when she was 14 and his mother had married several times and had…