Black market adoptees turn to DNA testing to find families

McCAYSVILLE, Ga. They were adopted off-the-books decades ago, scattered by a Georgia doctor who took $100 or $1,000 or something in between to send desperate couples home with new sons and daughters. Now some of the adoptees have turned to fresh DNA testing in hopes of reconnecting with the biological families they never knew, before time runs out.

This is our shot in the dark, really, said Melinda Elkins Dawson, one of more than 200 newborns relocated to other states from the clinic in McCaysville in the 1950s and 60s.

As children, their true ancestry was erased on birth certificates falsely listing adoptive couples as their natural parents. Genetic codes are the only links left.

So Dawson worked with Ohio-based DNA Diagnostics Center to arrange free cheek-swab sampling Saturday at a motel in Ducktown, Tennessee, a few miles from where the clinic was located. The adoptees hope potential relatives from the area come forward to give samples, even if they remain anonymous.

Were not trying to make anyone look bad, she said. Were just trying to get some answers. Every adopted child has questions. We deserve some answers.

The doctor who ran the McCaysville clinic, Thomas Hicks, died in 1972. There is unsettled debate about whether he sold babies on the black market, charitably helped those in need while merely recouping his expenses, or perhaps did both.

The adoptees giving new DNA samples dont care much about his motives. Theyre looking for links that could flesh out family trees, fill in medical histories or salve the burn of simple questions: Where did I come from? What did my parents look like? Do I have more siblings?

Were not trying to make anyone look bad. Were just trying to get some answers. Every adopted child has questions. We deserve some answers.-Melinda Elkins Dawson

Palmisano didnt notice much obvious resemblance to Dawson, but his excited blue eyes met hers and sold her on a possibility. Maybe, just maybe, this guy could be her twin brother.

Dawson, who lives outside Canton, Ohio, is among those who have been down this path before, in the late 1990s, when one adoptees search for her parents revealed there might be hundreds of Hicks babies. Some of them gave DNA samples for testing.

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Black market adoptees turn to DNA testing to find families