Stolen Identity

For most of her life, Shirley Frankel has wondered over and over: “Who am I?”

Sometime before Frankel was placed with her adoptive family when she was about 6 months old, she was given a false identity--one so completely fabricated that she will probably never find the answer to the question that haunts her.

“I have no history,” says Frankel, 65, of Huntington Beach. “I don’t know if I was stolen. I don’t know my genetic background or why I’m allergic to wheat. . . . This is my whole life,” she says as she waves her bogus adoption records, part of the paper trail in a frustrating 30-year search to find her birth parents.

Frankel’s adoption was one of many handled by Georgia Tann, now infamous for making a fortune black-marketing babies when she headed the Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis.

Her birth records had not simply been altered but represented a stolen identity. The same birth certificate, birth date and same mother and father belonged to someone else--someone completely unrelated.

When Frankel learned what had happened, she cried for days.

“I was so discouraged,” she says. “All the times before, I would hit dead-ends. But this time it was a brick wall.”

Each year, thousands of adoptees in this country search for their birth families. According the California Adoption Alliance, the best guess of the search and reunification movement is that between 2% and 4% of all adoptees search each year. The majority is successful--except in cases where records were falsified, as in Frankel’s case.

Attitudes about adoption have changed so dramatically that today not only do adoptees and birth parents establish contact if they wish, but a birth mother often chooses the family where her child will be placed.

Frankel’s case stands in stark contrast.

Not only was there deception in the original arrangements, but Frankel’s adoptive mother never discussed the adoption with her--it was off-limits as a topic of conversation.

*

Frankel and her husband, Art, who have been married 46 years, have five children and nine grandchildren. She is a document processor for an insurance brokerage firm; he is a retired high school counselor and teacher.

The fullness of Frankel’s life has not erased her longing to feel connected to an ancestry.

It was March 1932 when she was adopted by George and Libbie Marsh, Russian Jewish immigrants who lived in Des Moines.

Her adoptive father owned a taxi and rental car business, and her adoptive mother was a housewife. Both were 41.

Because of their ages and desire to adopt a Jewish child, Frankel said, it was probably difficult for them to adopt in their home state. The Marshes had contacted their rabbi, who knew of another Des Moines couple who had adopted a Jewish child through the Children’s Home Society in Memphis.

At the time of Frankel’s adoption in 1932, the Memphis branch was run by Tann, who in 1950 was accused of selling babies and reportedly made at least $1 million handing over infants to adoptive parents who believed she was dealing honestly with them. It is estimated that from the early 1920s to 1950, about 5,000 children were adopted through the Memphis branch, though not all were illegally surrendered or placed. As the case broke, Tann died of cancer, taking with her the truth about what transpired in Frankel’s adoption and that of many others.

Frankel now doubts that she is from a Jewish background, as Tann purported in arranging the adoption.

“I probably was a Southern Baptist, if anything,” says Frankel, who was raised in the Jewish Orthodox traditions and learned to speak Yiddish from her adoptive grandmother.

Frankel figures that even the Sept. 9 birth date she has called her own for so many years is not accurate.

*

As a child, Frankel says, she was teased by neighborhood children who told her the Marshes were not her natural mother and father.

“I confronted my mother, and she told me, ‘It doesn’t make any difference. You’re like my own flesh and blood.’ She said she loved me as if I was her own child.”

The subject was never brought up again.

“Back then, you didn’t discuss things like that. My mother was very strict and rigid,” Frankel says.

When Frankel was nearly 6, her adoptive father died. Her mother supported them by sewing for the military, then working in alterations at a department store in Des Moines.

Frankel was about 11 when her curiosity about her adoption was again fueled. She had discovered a leather accordion file in her mother’s bedroom dresser that contained adoption papers naming Hazel Beal as an unwed Memphis woman who had given birth to a daughter named “Sarah.”

“I knew it was me, but I was too young to realize what adoption actually meant,” Frankel says.

Throughout her childhood, there were many times when Frankel would sneak into the bedroom and peek at the adoption papers.

When Frankel met her future husband at a college fraternity party in Des Moines in 1948, she was 16 and still in high school.

“Shirley was ashamed to tell me she was adopted,” says Art Frankel, who was 20 and a student at Drake University in Des Moines when they met. “Her mother made it a shameful thing.”

Libbie Marsh died in 1971 from cancer without ever discussing the adoption with her daughter.

Even as Frankel had children of her own, her questions about her past persisted: Why was she was put up for adoption? Why was she so sickly as a newborn? Did she have any siblings? Did she inherit the intolerance to wheat gluten that is so strong she can’t eat pizza, cookies, cakes--anything made with flour?

In 1967, Frankel and her husband embarked on a search for her birth mother. They had little information to go on. Only the name Hazel Beal.

Shirley Frankel had written to Tennessee’s Office of Vital Statistics and the Department of Human Services for her birth certificate but was told her records were sealed. When Tann’s baby-selling business was uncovered, all records were sent to Nashville.

Over the years, Frankel contacted various organizations that she hoped could help locate her family. Among them was Tennessee’s The Right to Know, a nonprofit group co-founded by Denny Glad that has helped more than 1,000 adoptees search for their birth families.

Glad has assisted many adoptees, birth parents and birth siblings affected by the adoptions arranged through the Memphis Children’s Home Society.

“When [Tann] charged fees, people paid in good faith, not thinking they were buying a child, and she put the money in her own pocket,” Glad says.

“The power went to [Tann’s] head. It was the idea that she could play God and give people children who couldn’t get them any other way.”

Even with the experience she acquired working on other Tann cases, Glad was unable to help Frankel.

*

Despite many dead-ends, the Frankels continued to pursue every angle they could.

When Art Frankel read a newspaper article in 1992 about the federal government releasing the 1920 Census, he started combing through records at the federal building in Laguna Niguel.

“I went through thousands of names hoping to find a Hazel Beal,” Art Frankel says. “I went through all the records from Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi.”

He found a Hazel Beal from Jackson, Tenn., who would have been old enough to give birth to a child in 1931. The Frankels contacted everyone named Beal in Jackson and neighboring cities, but no one had heard of Hazel Beal.

One of their contacts suggested they call Peggy D. Mathes, a Nashville attorney who has assisted adoptees in gaining access to their records. Tennessee laws had become more relaxed, and Mathes had success in obtaining records for others.

In May 1992, the Frankels hired Mathes to obtain a court order to open her records, and by late August, she secured the order. Within a month, Frankel had her birth certificate and many pages of documents--including her adoption file and background on the Memphis Children’s Home Society.

That was when Frankel learned that her supposed birth mother, Hazel Beal, was not. Beal was married to William Cohen from Memphis, and they had a daughter--a daughter they raised--who has the same birth date as Frankel. The birth information was apparently “borrowed” to help build the false identity given Frankel. The records also showed aunts, uncles, siblings and other relatives--all of whom turned out to be fictitious.

*

“It’s a real strange case. It’s the only one I’ve ever had like this, and I’ve opened a lot of adoption records,” says Mathes, whose cases have included 25 from the Memphis Children’s Home Society. “I didn’t know what to tell Mrs. Frankel. . . . I felt so sorry for her. Just the fact that she couldn’t find out . . . what her origins were.”

Frankel’s case is also the first one Glad said she has seen since she began conducting searches 18 years ago in which the records were “totally fabricated from beginning to end.”

Over the years, Glad’s organization has encountered records in which information such as income, education, religion and age were false or conflicting. But more often than not, Glad says, there are some clues that help lead to a successful search.

Glad says Tann frequently falsified information to make it appear that a child had a Jewish background.

Because anti-Semitism was prevalent at the time of Frankel’s birth, Glad says Jewish people found it difficult to adopt children.

“They found they could get a child through Tann, and she was very willing to oblige,” she says.

Based on her study of Frankel’s records, Glad speculates that Tann found herself in a dilemma when her superior from the Nashville headquarters--rather than Tann herself--delivered Frankel to the Marshes.

“My educated guess is that Tann had no records of this child and found herself in a situation she couldn’t handle and so she had to come up with a record.”

*

L. Anne Babb, president of the American Adoption Congress, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that advocates access to adoption records and ethical adoption processes, says that since the mid-1970s, hundreds of thousands of adoptees nationwide have take steps to have their birth records opened or find their natural families.

“As many as 88,000 different adoptees per year are searching at any given time in the United States,” Babb says, “a figure consistent with the high percentage of adoptees who want information about their origins.”

Babb says she has spoken with “hundreds, perhaps thousands” of adoptees and birth mothers whose records were falsified to some extent. In some instances, expectant mothers were given an alias in a maternity home, or an adoption agency used an alias without the mother’s knowledge.

Whatever form the deception takes, Babb says, “falsifying birth records is highly unethical.”

*

The deception in Frankel’s adoption papers continues to take its toll more than six decades later.

Her questions linger: Was she sold by Tann? Was her biological mother coerced into giving her up? Where did she live the first six months of her life before her adoption? Who are her birth parents?

Frankel and her husband know there is almost no hope she will ever find her birth relatives--a realization she says is heartbreaking.

Still, Frankel hangs on to one piece of the puzzle that has felt real to her. She drives a car with a personalized license plate bearing the name that appears on her adoption papers: “Sara.”