BC woman continues 30+ year search for son adopted in Prince George

A Chilliwack woman is reaching out to the Prince George community for help in locating her biological son that was immediately adopted after being born at UHNBC (at the time was known as the Prince George Regional Hospital) over 50 years ago.

Sandra Hawkes says all she knows about her son is that he was born sometime in March of 1969 when she was 19, and he was likely adopted privately without using an adoption agency.

She has been searching for her biological son, who would now be 52 years old, since the mid 1980’s.

“I was a minor at the time. Back in 1969 and I did google it to make sure it’s correct but being a 19 year old was still considered a minor. So I didn’t sign off on anything, I’m assuming my mother did but both of my parents are deceased. So there are no records so people just tell me to ask Vital Statistics, well I did,” she explained.

Hawkes says her attempts at using Vital Statistics have been unsuccessful because of the lack of information she has about the adoption.

The birth records are also no longer available at the hospital or her family doctor either, and Hawkes has also exhausted using family tree websites including 22 and Me and Ancestry.com.

Initially, Hawkes wanted to keep the situation as private as possible, but recently she decided to post on a couple of community pages including “Hell Yeah PG” but it was removed multiple times.

“What prompted me to post on the account, I mean I’ve been searching for decades. Maybe it’s just having my 71st birthday, I don’t know,” she said, “I guess getting older and I kept running into brick walls so I decided to take a risk. All I remember is a baby in an incubator at the hospital in ICU, that’s all I remember and because the details are so limited it felt risky to put myself out there and be public but I thought at this point in my life I have to take a chance.”

Back in 1969, Hawkes was working in accounting at Baldy Hughes when it was a radar base, she has also tried reaching out to the company’s Facebook page but the majority of her coworkers are now retired.

Hawkes figures that Prince George was a relatively small community back then, and thinks that her son could still be living here.

“(Finding him) Would mean that I didn’t make it up and it did actually happen. I mean I have all kinds of proof, it’s just kind of hard for me to believe after all these years. Does he really exist? It’s really hard to explain, I mean to use the world closure would be silly and be cliché.”

She hasn’t had any children since then and says she would love to pass on any health information to him as there are some genetic health issues that run in her family.

“It would certainly help me understand how my life unfolded. Because if you do any research on birth mothers, for the most part… they don’t do that well, it’s really hard to give up a child, and especially when you have no control over it as a minor it’s traumatic it stays with you for the rest of your life. You know, I would die a good death, that’s what I’m trying to do I would find a little bit of peace in my life before I pass on.”