Book by Susan Fedorko, Cricket: Secret Child of a Sixties Supermodel

Susan Fedorko was in elementary school when she discovered the first clue: a strange birth certificate left behind on the dining-room table. It was for a girl her age—born in 1962—with the unfamiliar name of Veronica Dahmen. “I said, who is this baby Veronica?” recalls Susan. “I had no clue that it was me.” She had always felt stable and loved in her upper-middle-class family in South Minneapolis. Her parents, Lloyd and Virginia Smith, sent her to private school and raised her Catholic. But like many adopted Native American children, Susan felt different from her classmates. Her skin was darker, and she had a vague sense that she didn’t belong.

Not long after she found the birth certificate, she overheard her mother talking to her sister and using the word “adoption.” What were they talking about? Susan asked. That’s when her mother told her for the first time that she had been adopted.

She waited years before pursuing the subject further, out of concern for her adoptive parents’ feelings. It wasn’t until she turned 18 and moved out of her childhood home that she began to search for her biological parents. She wrote to the adoption agency that had placed her with the Smiths, but Minnesota law kept adoption records sealed. As she got older, she wrote again and again—approximately once a year over more than 20 years.

Susan was 40 years old when she received a phone call from Sarah Knestrick. Sarah, it turned out, was Susan’s half-sister—her biological mother’s second daughter. It had taken Sarah only a day and a half to find Susan; her mother had never hidden from her children the fact that she had given up a baby girl for adoption, and Sarah had stumbled across one of Susan’s many postings on an adoption-search website.

Here’s what Susan learned about her birth parents: Catherine Helen Dahmen was from the Chippewa Grand Portage tribe, Thomas Conklin from the White Earth Ojibwe Nation, both of Minnesota. Sadly, by the time Susan heard from Sarah, her parents had already passed away—her father a year earlier and her mother four years before that. At the time of her death, her mother was living only about 40 miles away from Susan’s home.

Catherine—or Cathee, as she was called—had never wanted to give up her first child. But she was only 16 years old when she gave birth to Susan, and one day when she was away at school, her mother packed up Susan (then Veronica) and gave her up for adoption. The Smiths adopted her a year later.