Coventry Cathedral hosts Norcap adoption service
- Adoption support charity AAA NORCAP hosts reconciliation service for adoptees
- Hundreds attended the March 17, af event.
- Music marks the 30th birthday of the charity
NORCAP, a leading adoption support charity for adults effected by adoption hosted a Service of Reconciliation in Coventry Cathedral on March 17, the day before Mother’s Day.
Hundreds of adopted adults, birth relatives and adopters attended the event.
Many of the congregation benefited from NORCAP’s use of 192.com, which uses the edited electoral roll to reconnect missing family and friends.
“Through using powerful databases like 192.com we are able to reconnect relatives” explains Ms Milsted. “Our specialist researchers find over 90% of the people they look for and provide support for over 300 families each year, securing a successful reunion in most cases. Without services like 192.com many such reunions would not be possible.”
A recent beneficiary of NORCAP and 192.com was Sarah Brynes from Melbourne who found her half-brother after a 49 year separation.
“As all adoptees must ask, what are my parents like? Do they look like me? It’s an instinctive need to know who they are. For me it more than simple curiosity, it was an overwhelming, all-consuming desire that had to be resolved.”
Using the 27 million edited electoral rolls on 192.com, Sarah was able to track her birth mother’s movements from her last known address in Sussex.
“Without 192.com I’m not sure if I ever would have found them. This is a life changing event for me and the end of a very long road,” Sarah said.
Sarah made contact with her half-brother using NORCAP as an intermediary service, which helped Sarah make contact with her birth-mother.
Dominic Blackburn, Product Director of 192.com, said: “192.com helps reunites hundreds and families a year, and we are delighted to have been of assistance to NORCAP and other adoption charities.”
AAA NORCAP is home to the UK’s longest established Contact Register. Thousands of relatives have been successfully approached by NORCAP on behalf of adoptees over the years. The charity started in 1982 and offers a people-finding and intermediary service.
NORCAP’S ‘ribbon ceremony’ also featured at the March 17 event, accompanied by local singers and musicians. Each year the service is held, participants write on a piece of ribbon the name of the person they want to think about.
The ribbons are tied together and joined to hundreds of ribbons from previous years. At the end of the ceremony, the ribbons are gathered to take to the next year’s ceremony.