Man Gets To Know The Hidden Truth About His Adoption 35 Years Later

 A messed up childhood can affect your adulthood in a lot of ways. And it can be worse when you do not even know what is it that can be bothering you or has been affecting you since the very beginning.

Howard Burack, a 56-year-old man was adopted by a very loving family when he was just six months old. But Howard always felt like there was something in his life that was missing and when he started his journey of finding out about himself, he came across a truth that bothered him to the core and left him wondering everything about himself.

Meet Howard

Howard Burack is a 56-year-old man living in New York City. He had been adopted by a family living in New York and has been with the family since he was just six months old. Life had been pretty simple and easy until..

Aware

Unlike a lot of people who do not know about their foster family being different from their biological family, Howard knew that he had been adopted at a very early stage of his life. His family had never tried to hide the truth from him. 

Missing Piece

Howard considered himself very lucky to have got such a sweet and loving family. He had been thankful for his family each day but there was something that bothered him all the time. He had a constant feeling like something in his life was missing. 

Adoption

Born in 1963, Howard Burack was put up for adoption through one of the most prestigious adoption agency in New York City, the Louise Wise Services. It was a Jewish adoption agency and very famous at that time. 

Best Life

Howard’s family had tried to give the child the best life possible, as good as what his biological mother would have thought of for him. But even after such a nice family and having everything a kid can ever think of, Howard was never content. 

Thankful

“I grew up in a nice, upper-middle-class family in a nice, suburban area north of New York City, in Rockland County, and had a normal childhood, normal whatever, great parents,” said Howard. But there was something that did not feel right. 

Research

Howard had ignored this feeling for more than 35 years. But in the year 1998, when he was 35-years-old, he decided to finally confront his feelings and find out the reason as to why he was so disturbed from within. So he started looking for things. 

The Past

Howard knew that the first step would have to be to get details about his past. He knew that there was a part of his life that was not at all known to him and it was time to dig deeper into the facts of it. 

Louise Wise Services

The agency was very popular among the Jewish families that wanted to adopt at the time and Howard had also been there. So his first step was to contact the agency to inquire about his biological parents. 

Contacting

Howard contacted the agency in the hope of finding his biological mother but he was in for a piece of very big news about his past. “You just feel like you’re missing something, just don’t know what it was. You can’t touch it. You can’t feel it. Something was there,” said Howard. 

Failed Attempt

The agency told Howard all that they knew about his mother but it was not sufficient to find about her whereabouts. When he had given up all hopes, something very strange and absurd was revealed to him. 

The Agency

Louise Wise Services was one of the most famous and reputed agencies for adoption but the agency had a lot of secrets which did not seem to be good ones. And apparently, a lot of lives had been suffering because of these secrets. 

Taken Aback

When Howard got the news of the secret that was related to him, he couldn’t understand what to do. “I spent about two years, every day, thinking about this. It never left,” Howard said. “It was pretty disturbing.”

Upside Down

Howard was very disturbed after he got to know about the life-changing secret that was hidden from him for 35 years of his life. He started to question his own existence and had doubts about everything around him now. 

Fraud?

Howard could not understand how an agency with such a good name hid such an important part of his life from him? Who had even given them the authority to do so? No agency has the right to alter someone’s life so drastically. 

No Clue

The worst part was, Howard was given no clue of the secret by the agency officially when he contacted them to ask about the details of her biological mother. But there was one kind person who was watching everything and decided to be helpful. 

Kind Soul

A woman who had been working at Louise Wise Services for a very long time decided to make the life-changing revelation to Howard. She had been suffering from Terminal cancer and felt it was her duty to make things right. 

Illegal Path

The woman knew that Louise Wise Service’s authorities won’t ever reveal the secret about Howard’s life to him, so she would have to do something herself. She took the chance of going against the authorities and risking her own job, to tell Howard the truth.

2000

After calling the agency to inquire about his mother in 1998, Howard got a call from the woman in 2000, and this call changed everything for him and his life was not the same after that one call. It went upside down.

Clueless Two Years

After being clueless for two years about what to do of the secret that had been revealed to him, and wondering in anxieties, the call from the woman was the conclusion to all the things. It was now all going to come to an end. 

Secret Revealed

The woman working at the agency had called not just Howard but also a man named Doug Rausch, telling him he was not the only child of his parents. He was an identical twin, and his brother was also at Louise Wise Services, but this fact was hidden from both the men all through their lives. 

Confirmation

Yes, Howard and Doug were identical twins, and this news meant that what Howard always felt was not wrong. The feeling that something was missing from his life was a true one and it was his identical twin that he had been missing all through his life. 

Determined

Doug made the decision to find his brother, even though he knew the adoption agency would not tell him anything at all and he would have to carry forward the search all by himself. But he was determined to do so. 

Difficult Times

For two years, Howard knew that he had an identical twin, but he was given no confirmation on the same by the agency legally and he had no clue about where to start from. But now that the woman had called, he had the confirmation and the twin’s contact number.

Confusion Cleared

“I mean, it was just an unknown. It’s like, ‘How could I find this person? Am I ever going to find this person? Is this person alive?” were the thoughts that crossed Howard’s mind for two years. 

Finally Found

Doug had little details about Howard, whatever was available with the woman unofficially, and so did Howard. It was Howard who finally tried to contact Doug without any hesitation. The phone rang…

On The Other Side

Doug received the call and the two long-lost brother’s connected immediately. With their first call only, the two felt like they had known each other since a very long time, and it was no surprise to expect this from them, given that they were identical twins. 

Generous Woman

“She goes, ‘I’m not supposed to do this. I can get in a lot of trouble, but I’m going to do it anyway.’ So I appreciate that,” Doug said. “She said, ‘Well I have some news for you. You have an identical twin brother.’ And I was like, I literally almost drove off the road. It’s not something you ever expect to hear.”

First Meeting

Doug and Howard decided to meet each other at an airport in Columbus, Ohio. They had met after almost 50 years, but it seemed like they had known each other already. “I finally called him and we talked for a while and it was, you know like I knew this person my whole life. It was amazing,” Howard said. 

Unforgettable

Meeting for the first time after so many years has been one of the most unforgettable experiences for both the brothers. “I don’t get nervous really easy or rattled and I still remember sitting on that plane dripping sweat and just being so nervous about, you know, meeting this person that looked like me, that I had no connection with,” Doug said.

Different Feeling

“It was just the funniest thing I’d ever seen ‘cause it literally was like looking in my reflection, but then the reflection would move and do something I wasn’t doing. … I don’t know how to describe that and I don’t think most people can relate to it, but it was a very, very weird feeling,” Doug said.

Not Just It

Meeting each other was not the only surprise for Doug and Howard. When the two started to talk about their respective lives and families, it was astonishing to hear about the similarities between those as well. 

Co-Incidences

Both Doug and Howard got married in 1992, and both of them hated condiments. Both the brothers had kids and their kids loved playing hockey. Even their wives were very similar. 

Indistinguishable

“They’ll probably get mad at me if they hear this but I think they’re more similar than me and Howie,” Doug said about his and Howard’s wives. “They both were runners. They both were successful in their fields and they both are pretty type-A personalities. I don’t know, I think they’re similar in a lot of ways. And you can only imagine that’s probably because what we both were attracted to…”

Strange Acts

Both Doug and Howard also remember that a lot of strangers recorded and shot them when they were children, and they had no idea as to why. And even though they were adopted at the same time, none of the parents were told of the twin. 

Unaware Of Plans

It soon came out that both Doug and Howard were unaware of a follow-up study that they were a part of since their childhood. However, it was not as clean as it seemed. They had negative intentions and a lot of children suffered because of it. 

Separated

Louise Wise Services separated the twins on purpose just to study the effects of their separation. In 2017, director Lori Shinseki released a documentary on this ugly truth about the agency, and that is when Doug and Howard were made aware of it. 

Ugly Truth

“They decided to separate these twins and triplets, place them in different families, and never told the families that they had adopted a half of a twin set or a third of a triplet set,” said Lori Shinseki, a documentarian.

The Strategy

“What they did was they told the families that this baby is in an adoption study. ‘If you want the baby, we would like to continue studying the child.’ And, of course, the families would do anything,” said Shinseki. 

Fraudulent Agency

“To do what they decided to do,” Doug said. “It’s just wrong. What they did was really, really wrong. The more stuff I read, the more wrong it seems and the more upsetting it gets.” A lot of lives have suffered because of this one plan of the agency. 

Effects

“Humans are not data… People in power have to be very careful to remember that you can really affect someone’s life, in ways that you just didn’t even mean to,” Shinseki concluded after researching and finding out that some of the children who were involved in the study suffered serious mental health issues and even committed suicide. 

Permanent Loss

Because of a fraud strategy of an agency as reputed as Louise Wise Services, a lot of children have lost the kind of childhood that their biological parents must have thought of for them. “It would have been awesome growing up together, but I believe we were both very lucky and are not looking backward,” Howard said.

A Documentary

Documentarian Lori Shinseki helped Doug and Howard get answers related to their past. She made a documentary named The Twinning Reaction, which was about helping twins all over who were separated by the agency and what it did to them.