Foster Care Deja Vu

If you are a first time visitor, you may want to start reading from June 5 to the present. This will give you the necessary background information for this post.


My family moved to Katy, west of Houston, in 1993. After I left full time ministry, I started working for a roofing company, south of Houston, as an estimator/salesman. This gave me the opportunity to drive all over Houston. Occasionally I would have one of those "deja vu experiences all over again," as Yogi Berra would say.

One such occasion I drove by a large children's home. There were white cottages on the property that looked very familiar. I thought, "I think I lived here at one time." It was during this time that I started doing occasional research on the death of my father. I found the first report of his accident at the downtown Houston library, discovered where we lived and drove by our house. Of course, it was so much smaller than I had remembered it.

However, I didn't pursue if I had lived in the little white cottages, until seven years later. Between roofing gigs, I got a job with a foster care agency as a Community Relations Coordinator. On one occasion, I was with my program director getting the word out about our agency, and we were close to this very large children's center. This was the same place where I had those deja vu feelings. The cottages had been torn down, and now stood a beautiful new facility, probably one of the finest in the nation for a foster care agency. My program director and I went in and took a self guided "tour" of the lobby of this incredible complex.

I told my program director that I thought I may have lived here. I think she encouraged me to ask someone, so I asked the receptionist how I would find out. I met the records administrator, gave her the names of my family, and waited. After a few minutes, she came out and gave me some very surprising news.

"Yes, you and your siblings were under our care for eighteen months, from January 1960 to June of '61." I can remember feeling very odd, as if I had entered some type of sacred ground. She asked me a few questions and said that for me to get a copy of these records, I would need proof that my birth mother was deceased. I told her that I thought she was, but that we really weren't sure. I didn't have any records of her death. We based her death on not being able to find her, and the fact that she never tried to find us, after all these years.

Within in the next few weeks, I met with the records administrator and one of the foster care/adoption specialist. After "de-identifying the records, the adoptions specialist gave me an overview of what was in the records, and then gave me approximately a a third of what was in the file. Much of the information was "de-identified," but I was able to put quite a few of the pieces together, including the information previously written concerning Pastor McLaren.

These records and the conversations with the record administrator and the adoption specialist opened my eyes to some amazing information.