Stories
The journal is written by the team; these pages are written by members. A search that took nine years, a birth record read aloud in a Farsi office, a first meeting that ended badly and a second one that did not.
I have four lines of a song in Farsi I do not speak, recorded on a phone in an Oslo kitchen. I have been asking strangers to finish it for eleven years.
Thirty-one years, three DNA matches, one caseworker. My reunion was not a ceremony. It was two men going through a plastic bag of paper in a station café.
A day-by-day record of the gap between posting a request to Isfahan and the phone ringing, written while it was still happening rather than after.
I am a genealogist by trade. The professional version of me has solved other people’s Iranian searches for years and has been beaten by a nine-line entry in a 1990s notebook.
Bandar Anzali, 2016. Two hours that I spent three years calling a failure. The second meeting gave me a family — and it only happened because I did not stop.
