One of my favorite blog writers has a recent set of entries in which he discusses his families choice regarding exploring their adopted children's past. They have chosen not to really pursue this much, and put forward some very good reasons why. His focus is on the future and where he and his family are headed, and really, that is what life is about. To be honest, I'm not much of a family genealogy guy. I was born in New Jersey, but have lived in Washington state for nearly all my life. I don't ever really think about going back and seeing the town I was born in, or if the house my family lived in then is still standing. But I don't really have to. I have an Aunt on my mother's side who has researched their family tree back about as far as you can go. My father has become very involved in genealogy as well, and I know he has all kinds of information on that side of my family. I did actually Google around on the genealogy sites one afternoon and quite quickly found photographs of my great-great grandfather in his civil war uniform. I have photo albums with pictures of the home where I was born, as well as old home movies transferred to VHS I can watch if I want as well. With virtually no interest in this stuff, I know all kinds of stuff about where my ancestors came from what they did.

I know I can't give this kind of information to Kai and Shen regarding their birth-family, and for all I know they might not care a bit. I have a friend at work who was adopted as an infant and he says he really has no interest in finding his birth family. He's in his mid-thirties with a wife and kids of his own, and is clearly focused on looking forward not back. Again though, if he wanted to, he could probably find out quite a bit with a little work, and maybe knowing this lets him ignore this facet of his life more easily; just as my easy access to my family history enables me to pretty much ignore it.

For Kai and Shen there's a lot more to it, and like I said before, perhaps they will not be interested at all in this stuff. I think I could sleep better at night if I dug and dug for all the information I could get them and they didn't look twice at it, than if I did nothing and they came to me one day and asked why.