“Back in the early Seventies, when adoptees were at all public about wanting to find their birthparents, they were inevitably asked, “Don’t you think that would be opening up a Pandora’s box?” The point being made to us was that in finding our birthparents, we would be setting in motion things that could neither be controlled nor ever returned to how they had been before. Also, by the quick reference to Pandora, people had a polite (indirect) way of suggesting the likely discovery of bad stuff. No one ever seemed to picture us finding out anything good about our origins. Finding good people. They saw us ending up overwhelmed, ashamed, perhaps even done in by bad stuff that we ourselves would have let loose. Penny Callan Partridge, Author