I have spent the better part of the last six hours reverse engineering people and who they might be associated with using Instantcheckmate.com, Facebook, and Ancestry.com to glue individuals to one another based on their age, year they were born, and surnames. It felt like a jigsaw puzzle. Except in this case I did not have a picture to match the pieces with.
I started with the name of a potential birth son, who was adopted back in 1967. Then I located an individual who fit the criteria based on several factors that narrowed down the location, a potential surname, etc., but I could not prove the family we thought he had been adopted to. So based on his known relationships on Instantcheckmate.com I glued together a tree.
I am still not yet back at ground zero; the adopted son. Believe it or not, all the people surrounding him have been nearly completed. Fifty people so far, make up the two sides of the family around him. Obituaries from parents filled in where children too young to be theirs suddenly had to be moved to grandchildren status.
It was chaotic, and hard to stop. I just feel I needed to walk away from it for the evening and give it time to ferment in my head a little more. I would find an individuals Facebook page in the family, then sort their friends by surname and find other family members. Then go back to the database people finder to try and sort names found with actual family. Each time I got close I would then search and prove the actual families using Ancestry.com documentation.
Even now it feels awkward trying to explain how I went about gluing and ungluing, then resorting people until they fit. I am a few steps away from proving this (birth-mothers) son comes from a different family than we initially thought. Yet because I cannot prove it yet, it still stands to reason that he could still come from the adopted family we thought he did.
This explanation needs an interpreter. I guess at the level of search I am at, it just makes sense in my head. Is this where I start to babble and the people with the straight jacket come in and give me my medication and walk me off to the padded room? Ha!