Adoptee Biographies

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Andy Berlin

Berlin was adopted as a baby and grew up in a loving family in Germantown, Pennsylvania. Nevertheless, he felt different from others, even fantasizing that his birth parents were Martians. ... [more]

Anthony Williams

Williams was born in Los Angeles and was adopted by Virginia and Lewis Williams, one of eight children in the family. He graduated magna cum laude from Yale and went on to get a doctorat... [more]

Aristotle

Aristotle was the son of Nicomachus, physician to King Amyntas II. His parents died when he was still a very young boy and he was brought up by a guardian, Proxenus, who sent him to Plato's... [more]

Art Linkletter

Linkletter was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. He was abandoned by his parents as a child and adopted by an elderly couple who were itinerant evangelists. After several years they settled ... [more]

Bo Diddley

Diddley (a nickname he acquired in his high school days) was born Otha Ellas Bates in Mississippi. He was adopted, along with three cousins, by his mother's cousin and her partner. The fami... [more]

Buffy Sainte-Marie

Sainte-Marie is part Cree and was born on the Piapot Reserve in Canada. She was adopted by a white family from Maine, USA, and raised in Maine and Massachusetts. Her family encouraged her i... [more]

Carl-Theodor Dreyer

Dreyer was born in Copenhagen and went immediately into foster care, but he was adopted in 1891. He first became a journalist but by 1913 he was a caption writer for silent films. His fi... [more]

Charlotte Anne Lopez

Lopez was Miss Teen USA in 1993. She was placed in care by her mentally ill mother as a baby (with her brother and sister) and lived in foster homes in Vermont state for 15 years; by the... [more]

Christina Crawford

Crawford is the adopted daughter of the American movie star Joan Crawford. According to her biography of her mother, made into a movie in 1981, her childhood was bizarre, abusive and unhapp... [more]

Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Estés was born to a Mestizo (Native American-Hispanic) couple but adopted as an older child by a family of Hungarian refugee immigrants to America. She is a Ph.D. and a Jungian psychoana... [more]