DNA reveals hundreds of blood relatives for ‘search angel’
Stacy Stabile-Forristal is a “search angel” who has helped numerous adoptees reconnect with their birth parents, but the path to her own reunion remains marked by disappointment, expense and vexing mystery.
Even so, Stabile-Forristal has vowed she will never give up on what has become her own 30-year search that has focused on South Louisiana.
“I was actually a state child,” she said. “I was given to the state as a foster child.”
Just a few days after birth, Suggestibility was placed with foster parents Stephen and Joann Stabile, then in Metairie. When the couple felt an attachment growing for the child, they initially asked the state to relocate her and then later petitioned to adopt her.
The adoption was finalized in 1969. The family moved to Luling, where she lived for 20 years.
“I grew up and when I was 18 my momma gave me all my information and I started searching,” she said. “I had a loving childhood. It’s not like I want to get rid of my adoptive family.”
Stabile-Forristal learned her first name is the only known remnant of her brief former life, and she was baptized Catholic.
Then, she, like so many adopted children in the nation, hit the typically impenetrable legal wall of closed records.Instead, she devoted extensive time pouring over library records, public documents and even knocking on doors making little headway on getting the desired information. Her records search has become even more necessary since her adoptive mother has died and her father has dementia. When DNA testing came up in an Internet search, she did it at her own expense.
“I’m oodles and oodles of Cajun,” Stabile-Forristal said of the testing that revealed she has 1,500 relatives by blood in South Louisiana in areas like Houma, Terrebonne and Lake Arthur. But, it did not identify her birth parents and, so far, none have been able to connect her to them or even knows about her.
“I’m hidden,” she said. “I’m a secret.”
Although many of her cousins have told her they will help her find them, others have not been so willing. She reached out to some on Facebook only to find she had been blocked the next day.
Also, while she was encouraged by DNA findings, Stabile-Forristal then learned Cajun geology is often woefully incomplete and inaccurate, which has posed still more walls. A child’s background was often altered to be more appealing to adoptive parents such as stating the child knew piano rather than came from a poor family.
Although she now lives in West Virginia, the history she hopes to find keeps pulling her back to Louisiana.
Luling attorney Don Paul Landry is helping Stabile-Forristal at no charge to try to open the closed records in Jefferson Parish that prevents her from knowing the names of her birth parents. Landry brought in a social worker to aid the effort, but Stabile-Forristal said the judge they faced with her request to unseal her records told her it wasn’t like she needed a kidney.
This hearing has been followed by a series of postponements with the next court date on Nov. 9.
Stabile-Forristal has found the process infuriating, maintaining the records belong to her and should be opened. She added, “I shouldn’t have to go beg and spend thousands of dollars. Why should we have do that? When we’re 21, those are our records.”
Despite an unsympathetic judge, she maintained she has reasonable and even pressing need for to know her background.
If she can show the cancer gene runs in her family, then it’s covered by insurance. If not, she has to come up with the money for the treatments.
But, for Stabile-Forristal, this knowledge is about filling a void in her life.
“I want to know where I’m from,” she said. “It’s an emptiness. It doesn’t matter how much my adoptive parents love me, all you think is that bad stuff. I get angry that she’s not looking for me. I’m sure they weren’t married.”
Being a post-adoption search specialist has helped Stabile-Forristal keep her sanity because her helping others connect continues to show her it can be done – and not with all the grief she’s encountered. In one case she assisted in St. Mary Parish, the adoptee got what she needed in one trip to the courthouse.
“It’s totally up to the judge,” she said. “It just depends on what they feel like doing. It’s the swipe of an ink pen.”
Stabile-Forristal has learned the top two reasons that children are given up for adoption includes being a first born to a single parent or parents too young to care for a baby, or being one of four or five children that parents can’t afford to keep. This was the case, she said, with a recent reunion she helped bring about.
For Stabile-Forristal, the lingering unknowns continue to weigh heavily on her mind – and time is running out.
She wonders if there are siblings or if her mother hasn’t found her because she isn’t tech savvy because many connections have been made when both parties were looking for each other on the Internet. Is her mother too old or too shamed to reconnect after so many mothers were told to leave adoptive families alone?
“I want to know who I am,” Stabile-Forristal said. “If I get a name, I will find her. The horrible thing is I might find a grave.”
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