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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  New Year Ideas | Reconnect with family on Facebook
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New Year Ideas | Reconnect with family on Facebook

Thanks to the traces we leave behind on social media, it is easier than ever now to find people we thought we had lost for good

Go online to search for your roots.Premium
Go online to search for your roots.

A few years ago I logged on to Facebook one evening to find a message in my inbox. “I’m not sure you remember me," it said, “but we are cousins." A couple of hours and several messages later, I found myself at the house of my favourite aunt, whom I had not seen in 20 years.

I lost touch with my mother’s family shortly after her death. I was eight years old at the time, with needs that were lovingly met by my father and stepmother, so I must have learnt to make my peace with the circumstances, for my enduring memory of my childhood is one of reasonable happiness.

Over the years, I kept wondering about the sudden and complete disappearance from my life of people whose presence I had taken for granted. And yet, I did nothing to find them. I was fearful of disrupting the fragile order that the grown-ups around me were struggling to establish—till the past ambushed me one dull September evening as I sat at my workstation in my Kolkata office.

My experience of Facebook is by no means unique. Since the coming of the Internet and explosion of social media, there has been a quantum increase in our aspiration to connect. “In or around June 1995 human character changed," journalist Rebecca Solnit wrote last year in an essay on technology’s impact on our lives. So obsessed are we with our screen lives that reality seems to have no meaning until it has been endorsed by “likes", “retweets" and “comments" on social media.

But the primary reason behind Facebook’s mass appeal goes back to the idea that brought it into existence: of creating a gigantic yearbook, with its tentacles spreading out far and wide, in time and across geographical distance.

Critics of social media rightly deplore its physical, psychological and cultural costs. If the arguments against Facebook are obvious and well-rehearsed, the praises tend to be more reticent and cautious. Yet, whether we like it or not, Facebook has decisively changed the nature of human intimacy and complicated the realm of the possible.

Thanks to the traces we so generously leave behind on social media, it is easier than ever now to find, or reconnect with, people we thought we had lost for good.

Reconnecting with family and friends who have drifted apart is, more often than not, a means of seeking closure rather than re-establishing lasting bonds. The development of social media, for instance, has effectively ended the possibility of closed adoptions. Facebook has enabled many adoptees a chance to come to terms with the truth of their early lives, the circumstances that led to their biological parents giving them up for adoption.

In 2012, Saroo Brierley, an Indian-born Australian national, found his biological family by using a combination of Facebook and Google Earth. Born in a village in Madhya Pradesh, Brierley was separated from his mother and brothers at the age of 5, when he fell asleep on a train where he was foraging for leftovers. Unable to articulate the exact details of his home, the child Brierley spent some miserable months in poverty and danger, sleeping on the streets and working odd jobs, before being taken into a shelter for vagrant children. Months later he was adopted by John and Sue Brierley, an Australian couple, and given a new home in a foreign land.

Elizabeth “Betsy" Boys, adopted by a family in Indianapolis, US, as a baby, found her biological family after 29 years in less than two days with the help of Facebook.

A woman, writing under the alias of “Anastasia Beaverhausen" on a website that helps adoptees find their birth families (www.findmyfamily.org), claims she has traced her birth father on Facebook (“at least I think it is him.") An unwanted child of a teenage pregnancy, adopted as a baby, she draws a portrait of a philanderer, asking readers whether she ought to contact him.

Jono Lancaster, born with a condition that affects the bones of his face, began searching for his biological family on the Internet in 2009. “The fact they’ve given me up for adoption because of how I look made me wonder how could anyone else love me if they, my own parents, couldn’t," he said in a recent interview in The Independent. “As I grew up I thought about how they must have felt—that this was supposed to be the happiest day of their life and turned out to be a nightmare for them."

Stories such as these abound. Then there are others, like me, whose lives would have probably remained incomplete had there been no social media. Knowledge is not the most comforting of states; but denial is worse.

I continue to use Facebook warily, impersonally, taking long breaks from it, but feel drawn to it as well for the glimpses it offers into personal discoveries. Much of it tends to be banal, but there are little gems once in a while. Such as this one: In 2010, a Facebook page was created to help a knitted soft toy find its owner after it was left in a tearoom in Thorpeness, Aldeburgh, in the UK. The page “I’m lost. Help me find my family" was liked by more than 10,000 people and widely shared on social media, leading to the cuddly cat’s eventual reunion with its owner, a toddler named Ned.

Few children of a generation past would have grown up with such a lovely memory.

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Published: 04 Jan 2014, 12:24 AM IST
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