Regarding attitudes toward adoption: I was adopted as an infant in 1940. I didn't learn that I was adopted until I was around nine years old, and the reason my adoptive mother told me then was to instill in me a sense of gratitude and duty, since I was perceived as a "difficult child." She told me never to tell anybody, since at that time there was a good deal of stigma attached to adoption. It took me years, until I was in my 30s, to even get my adoptive parents to let me see my adoption papers, and even then they wouldn't let me take them to be copied because "somebody might see them." It took me many more years to find my birth family, but I did get to meet my birth mother, three half-siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins. All were very welcoming. Only last summer did I find my birth father, who unfortunately had been dead since 1979, around the time I started searching for my family. I would have hoped that by now attitudes toward adoption have gotten more enlightened. I'm certainly not ashamed of being an adoptee and I make no secret of it. I've researched both my adoptive and my birth families. Carolyn Long (originally Michael Anne Thompson, descended from Samuel Thompson, who, according to family lore, was a British soldier who deserted at the time of the Battle of New Orleans and settled in Mississippi)