Families by choice

One day 20 years ago, Dr. Debbie Ingram got a phone call she always hoped to get.

"We have your baby daughter," the caller said. "Plan to see her tomorrow and take her home Monday morning."

Several days later, Dr. Ingram and her husband, David, were the parents of Alex, one of the last infants adopted through Family and Children's Services of Chattanooga (now the Partnership for Families, Children and Adults).

The Partnership, in preparing to celebrate National Family Week (Nov. 22-28), is searching for children who were adopted through the agency.

Client confidentiality prevented the agency from retaining contact information from the adoptions it administered from the 1940s to 1989.

"We got to thinking about the type of families we have worked with," said Holly Ashley, assistant director of development for the Partnership, "and one is (the) families we built through private adoptions."

It is the agency's hope, she said, to have a reunion of sorts next spring of children who were adopted through the agency through the years.

The agency helped with more than 5,000 adoptions during the period, averaging some 180 adoptions a year in the peak years of 1944-1974, according to records.

Dr. Ingram said she and her husband considered other agencies when they decided to adopt, but Family and Children's Services had counseling services available immediately and could start the adoption process.

When Mrs. Ingram received the call three years after the couple began the adoption process, they had nothing prepared, she said. Then director of rehabilitation services at Erlanger hospital, she said she had to inform her supervisor the next day that she wouldn't be back.

Although Tennessee law at the time allowed birth parents to change their minds up to 30 days after the child's birth, the Ingrams' daughter was 5 weeks old when they got the call.

Nevertheless, she said, "we were still afraid it might not happen. But it did."

Today, Alex, 20, is a junior at the University of Tennessee. Despite losing most of her hearing to an auto-immune disease when she was 3, she graduated from Bright School and Baylor School and is an aspiring early elementary school teacher.

Mrs. Ingram, who is director of clinical education at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, is a member of the Partnership's board of directors.