Adoption: The Making of Me. An Oral History of Adoptee Stories

Pam: A Rare Diagnosis Led This Adoptee on a Search

Louise Browne & Sarah Reinhardt Season 6 Episode 5

Pam Uzzell is a documentary filmmaker and podcaster currently living in Oakland, CA. She is the director and producer of four independent documentaries and the host and producer of the podcast, Art Heals All Wounds. 

Her adoptive parents were loving but saw her as the “oddball” of her family, resulting in a profound sense of loneliness. She turned to reading as a way to find a sense of belonging, which led her to gravitate towards storytelling as a career. She’d often been curious about both of her biological parents, but when she was diagnosed with a rare disease at age 30, it felt more crucial to find answers. 

After making a connection with her birth mother and her extended family years later, no one on that side of the family appears to have this disease. She discovered that her biological father had passed away two years before she found out his name. In all probability, he was the parent who passed this disease down and he had no other children besides her. However, there are unexplained DNA connections on Ancestry that suggest a mystery behind her father’s origins. Despite attempts to connect with these connections and get more information, she still has more questions than answers about her father’s ancestry and whether there are more biological family members who share this disease.

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