NYC agency marks 140 years of caring for children

NEW YORK —The worn leather-and-corduroy-bound books stacked in a Manhattan closet are packed with secrets.

Inside the tomes are the names of parents whose children ended up with The New York Foundling, one of America’s oldest and largest child welfare agencies.

The not-for-profit celebrated its 140th anniversary by hosting a homecoming Saturday of about 600 people linked to The Foundling — from adoptees and former foster children to their relatives and caregivers.

Many are still searching for details of their past.

Bernadette Serton’s interest in her lost roots was reawakened after the birth of her daughter last year.

“I wanted her to know her whole history,” said Serton, whose late mother was given away when she was 10 days old and later adopted.

The 36-year-old freelance writer from Brooklyn came with her aunt from Virginia, whom she only discovered in July.

What Serton learned about her biological family was a surprise, she said.

Her mother, Madeline Boylan, was born to a 28-year-old woman with a master’s degree from a wealthy New York family who had traveled the world and was tutored aboard a ship. The woman kept her pregnancy a secret, giving up her daughter, Serton’s mother, whose adoptive family named her Eileen. Boylan never knew she had a biological sister — the aunt from Virginia who, incredibly, also was named Eileen.

“So when my daughter was born last year, I named her Eileen,” said Serton.

She pored through Foundling documents, then hired an adoption investigator who used U.S. census, marriage and death records to locate her aunt, Eileen Price, in Virginia.

The Foundling has helped place hundreds of thousands of children with adoptive parents or in foster care since 1869, when a baby was abandoned in front of a Greenwich Village brownstone on a cold October night. Distraught mothers started leaving more babies with the Sisters of Charity order of Roman Catholic nuns, and The Foundling was born.

On any given day in New York, more than 1,200 children are in the foster care of the agency whose stated mission is “Abandon No One.”

The organization today also operates a Bronx charter school benefiting foster children and a Head Start program in Puerto Rico, while working on preventing child abuse and neglect.

On Saturday, Wendy Freund, who each day helps people research their family history as the agency’s longtime supervisor of records, was one of the featured speakers.

“People have a right to know their past, especially these days when many are socially isolated or lonely,” she said. “Everybody needs some connection.”

But, she warned the audience, finding birth mothers and families can be problematic.

“What are you going to do on holidays? Who are you going to spend them with?” said the licensed clinical social worker. “It’s like a honeymoon. And then what? Take it slow.”

Freund must keep original parents’ names secret, under New York’s confidentiality laws first enacted in 1884. But she can reveal everything else recorded in the old baptismal tomes in the closet, on index cards and, after 1984, in computerized files.

“I can tell some people what their mother looked like, even the color of her hair and what she did for a living — but not her name; that piece of paper is sealed,” said Freund, noting that the medical information of a person’s birth parents is often critical in making health care decisions.

The Foundling has a $95 million annual budget covered mostly by government funds, and does not have the money to computerize all the old files. Many adoptees find their biological families through a state register that links parents and children looking for each other.

Some, like Serton, hire investigators to link available information leading to reunions, using databases, documents — even Foundling records like “a history of deafness or kidney failure in a parent,” said Freund, adding that the information is then coupled with, say, dialysis lists and hearing test records.

At The Foundling’s headquarters in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, records also reveal why mothers might have given up their children, from not being able to care for them to pregnancies resulting from rape. Some children were baptized in a chapel in the building. And when they get married, they call for the baptismal certificates.

But many families feel the confidentiality laws that keep their original family identity a secret should be open to them.

“I felt abandoned by the state,” said Serton.

At 41, Trebor LeFebvre is only starting her search. Adopted through The Foundling when she was 9 months old, by a Bronx couple, the fashion consultant knows nothing about her birth family.

“I’m here to find any information,” said the mother of five from Alexandria, Va. “I love my adoptive family, but my children are needling me to find out.”

Copyright 2009 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.