Barking Up the Family Tree: An Adoption Memoir

By Jill McDowell

Adventure, Adoption, Humor . . . and more. Join this adoptee-memoirist-sleuth as she navigates three countries, mountains of red tape and a forest of branches to find her place in the family tree.
Writer Jill McDowell relives a humorous, poignant and captivating saga as she doggedly pursues her identity, history and pedigree (or lack thereof). Learn how she and 230 other infant adoptees were "disappeared" from Canada in the 1940s under the auspices of Alberta's Adoption Services. Scandal, intrigue, and serendipity abound.
Follow along as a jetlagged McDowell, having just returned from one of her many trips to Russia, happens upon a "Personals" ad in the Los Angeles Times. Listen while she connects with phone directory services in Canada in a first attempt to ferret out family. Rejoice when she encounters a hand-drawn map of the Russian Village where Germans from Russia (her people?) first settled in 1763.
Witness the aftermath of a tornado that decimated the family homestead, save for a rickety barn everyone had hoped would blow away. Meet busloads of Mennonites arriving to lend a hand and pick up debris from fields of bright yellow canola.
Then, in Part Two, lose yourself in Mother Russia as this directionally-challenged memoirist narrates episodes from her two-year stay in the land of her ancestors.
From Brits to bugs to bureaucracy, you'll accompany author McDowell as she visits the 1000-year-old village of Suzdal on Christmas morning when the weather is a nippy 39 degrees below zero. You'll follow along as she traces her family history in Norka, a Volga-German settlement established during the reign of Catherine the Great, and join in as she and her Japanese Embassy colleagues lose their way on the dusty backroads 350 kilometers from Moscow. Experience the miles of red tape at the Russian Embassy in Estonia, and meet a cast of unlikely characters aboard the Polonaise as McDowell journeys by train from Warsaw to Moscow and—with a stroke of good luck—back again.
This entertaining second part of McDowell's narrative (published previously as Lost in Mother Russia) will take you on a humorous journey through Eastern Europe as the author researches her ancestry, teaches ESL to Russian and Japanese speakers, and gets lost in the vast and snowy expanse of Russia.
Finally, in Part Three, Barking Once Again, catch up with recent and remote family goings-on in the Great White North where our intrepid Canadian traveler returns time and again to the land of her birth. Happy Travels!

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9781667896816

Book preview

PART ONE

BARKING UP THE FAMILY TREE

Episode One

JETLAGGED

Probably just jetlag, I reassured myself, having returned only the day before from my eleventh trip to Russia. Although not nearly as loud as the Aeroflot jumbo jet engines accompanying me on my flight from Moscow to Los Angeles, but every bit as persistent, the annoying voice now droned on as I tried to peruse The LA Times, spread out in front of me on my dining room table. The combined on-ground and in-air travel time from Moscow’s Sheremetovo Airport to Los Angeles International had been twenty-seven hours. Yes, jetlag was an entirely plausible explanation for the noise which was reminiscent of a buzzing mosquito circling my bed in search of its midnight snack. As it became more insistent, the nagging voice became more recognizable; it appeared to be American, with a cadence similar to my own, and I thought I also detected a touch of Canadian, with just a hint of Slavic. Yes, most certainly related to jetlag. (I hoped.)

Read the Personals Column; read the Personals Column, reiterated the articulate nag. Well, I almost never read the Personals Column, and even more infrequently do I pay heed to auditory hallucinations arising from jetlagged exhaustion, but the nagging little voice wouldn’t shut up. Alright, already—I’ll read the Personals Column!

And there, as though to say—see I told you so—appeared a tiny, unadorned announcement: Alberta Babies—seeking anyone adopted as Alberta-born baby in the 1940’s for newspaper research. Contact Richard Helm, Edmonton Journal, Alberta, Canada.

Seeking all Alberta-born babies born between 1940 and 1947? That was me! I was one of those babies. What were the chances of my ever seeing that announcement? One in a zillion? Probably fewer. Richard Helm had placed the ad in only two newspapers, The Los Angeles Times and a much smaller paper in Montana, and they ran for only two Sundays. I had just returned from Russia, hadn’t even completely unpacked my suitcases, and some pesky inner voice prompted me to pursue another chapter in my adoption saga.

From early childhood I had been attracted to Russia and all things Russian. Not the Soviet Union, but Russia—Russian music, Russian folk art, the Russian language. On the rare occasion when there was a movie available in Russian I was enraptured just listening to the sounds of the language, not one word of which I understood. However, I grew up during the Cold War, and any warmth towards the Evil Empire was highly suspect.

When I was twenty-six, my adoptive parents finally decided to tell me that I was half Russian and half German. I wasn’t especially happy about the German part of my lineage, but I was intrigued and delighted about the Russian part. So delighted, in fact, that I immediately enrolled at Pasadena City College, and launched into a decades-long study of Russian.

In 1990, on the spur of the moment, I decided to take a trip to the then Soviet Union and promptly booked the last remaining single cabin on board the M.S. Rus, a small, fewer than three-hundred passenger cruise ship. Serendipitously, this leisurely two-week round-trip river voyage along the Volga from Moscow to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) represented the first time in Soviet history that Americans and Russians had been allowed to mingle, not only on board, but during our many shore excursions as well. In their centuries-old villages, wrinkled grandmothers greeted us in poignantly worded English: I old babushka. All babushka peace want. Babushka war not want. Please, peace.

Initially, I was less than enthralled with the living conditions I encountered in the CCCP (USSR), not least of which was the toilet tissue seemingly crafted from brown paper customarily reserved for grocery bags in the United States. Perhaps that explains the absence of the bags themselves, for I never spotted an actual Kraft bag during this or any subsequent trip to Russia. Besides, it was necessary to provide your own shopping bag which was usually made from netted string; it was called a just in case bag as most Soviets routinely carried one or two, just in case there was anything available to buy.

When purchasing sour cream, you were required to bring along your own jar into which a clerk ladled a measured portion of the creamy product. Etiquette required that you wash your container, or at least rinse it out, before heading to the dairy shop. Similarly, eggs were sold unpackaged; it took a brave soul with steady hands to transport them from the egg shop home without benefit of a padded carton. Supermarkets were nonexistent, and, because the Soviet government owned everything, products were sold exclusively by government workers in government shops. Lemonade was sold at the government juice shop, meat at the butchers, bread at the bakery, vegetables at yet another government shop, fruit at — well, you get the idea. Oh, and where would you look for the aforementioned Kraft-inspired toilet tissue? Why, at the stationers, of course.

On the plus side, Moscow had an elegant, beautifully designed, highly efficient, wonderfully safe, immaculately maintained, extensive metro system which could get you almost anywhere in this capital city of twelve million people. However, being the significantly directionally-challenged traveler that I am, I feared boarding any form of transportation on my own.

I needn’t have worried. Near the close of our round-trip voyage along the Volga, a few Muscovite cruise mates took me under their collective wings and offered to show me around their city via metro, bus, trolley, taxi, and on foot. The locals invited me to their drab, airless, identical and unadorned concrete clusters of Khrushchev-era apartment buildings with dark, dank, windowless entry-ways and non-functioning elevators.

We climbed the many flights of stairs to reach the heavily secured doors of their tiny one- and sometimes (still tiny, but less so) two-room apartments. Once inside, bright hues of red, green and blue greeted us, as did collections of Russian lacquer folk art and ornately decorated china. Oriental rugs often made a prominent appearance, and, giving a whole new meaning to the term wall to wall carpeting, the rugs lay not on the serviceable wood parquet flooring, but did, indeed, hang from one wall to another.

Towards the end of an immensely enjoyable three weeks—two afloat and one ashore—in Mother Russia, I nonetheless began to look forward to a return to my familiar amenity-filled California lifestyle, and civilization as I knew it and thought it should be. However, having so recently made friends with a number of Russians, I had become captivated by their homeland. Hence, while winging my way back to Los Angeles, I was already planning a return trip to the country, countryside and culture that would become my passion for many years.

People who are obsessed with Russia are described not as being sick of Russia, but, rather, as being sick with Russia, and this certainly described me from my first visit in 1990 and throughout the following decade. Currently, I’m relieved to report, I have only intermittent low-grade symptoms of my once severe Russian sickness. I do miss authentic Russian borscht, though, served chilled during summertime, with fresh dill from the cottage garden and a dollop of sour cream swirled on top.

Just prior to my entering kindergarten, my mother told me I was adopted. Among the details, I learned that I was two weeks old when my mother and father went to the hospital and picked out the cute little baby girl with the shaggy black hair. She did an excellent job of telling me the news then, but throughout the years I really wasn’t able to ask many questions for fear of an angry or depressive backlash from one or both of my parents.

When my mother was seventy-two, she became ill with cancer. A few months before she died, we had one of our very rare conversations about my adoption. She said she had always known my real name and that prior to the adoption order #2523, which irrevocably changed my name to Jill McDowell Perkins, I had been Baby Girl Schwindt. I believe she wanted to give me the information that would enable me to begin a search for my birth family. Not wanting to hurt or alienate my adopted parents I had never told them how important it was for me to try to trace my roots—not to find a better family, but just to get a better sense of who I was and where I had come from.

My adopted mother died on my birthday, March 5th, 1993, and after an appropriately respectful length of time I began my quest in earnest. I now had a birthplace—Edmonton—which I had known about since age five, and finally, at age forty-nine, a surname. As an adoptee seeking her birth family, I had the rare fortune of having an unusual surname—Schwindt—and, as it turned out, the even rarer fortune of having been born into a family that had traced its genealogy back to 1763 during the reign of Catherine the Great of Russia.

I decided to pursue my search for my Schwindt relatives by phoning the directory service in Edmonton, Alberta, my birthplace. It seemed like a good place to start. Earlier I had looked in the mammoth Los Angeles phone directory and there were only seven Schwindts listed. How many would there be in the much smaller city of Edmonton?

With pencil and paper ready, I phoned directory service and inquired about the Schwindts. Where there a lot of them?

Oh, yes, replied the 411 Operator. There are fourteen of them.

Fourteen was nothing for a sleuth with bull dog tenacity!

Which one would you like? the friendly operator asked.

Well, I replied. I don’t really know. I’m doing a little genealogy research and I don’t have a first name to give you.

She helpfully began by reading the list of first names, and when she got to Molly, the name of my late great cat, I knew that was where I should start. My much-loved cat, Molly, had died prior to my first trip to Russia, and I still missed her and remembered her fondly.

Phone number in hand, I made my first adoption search call to Molly. We spoke for a few minutes shortly after noon on Wednesday, May 19th, 1993. Molly couldn’t have been more pleasant, but said she didn’t have that much information on the clan as she was a Schwindt by marriage only. She suggested I call her sister-in-law, Leah Giebelhaus, who was doing extensive work on the family tree. Perhaps Leah could help me, eh?

Immediately, I dialed Leah’s number. I half expected the receiver to be slammed down, but it wasn’t. We had a pleasant half-hour conversation after which I was referred to yet another member on my potential family tree, Katie.

Over the next few days I phoned all fourteen Schwindts in the Edmonton area. They referred me to other family contacts in Canada and the United States. I told each one I was doing genealogical research and hoped they might help me find at least one family member. Trying to be as discreet and respectful as possible, I didn’t tell them I was looking specifically for my mother. On Monday, May 24, 1993, I phoned George Schwindt. I learned that George, an artist specializing in equine and western themes, frequently exhibited his work at several galleries, as well as at the annual Stampede in Calgary, Alberta.

As it turned out, I wasn’t the only sleuth on the prowl. Like Leah and Katie, George had also been doing a good bit of research, and he told me he had a copy of the Schwindt family history that had been compiled by a number of family members. Would I like a copy? Would I!

But some more background first. After my adoptive mother