Special to The News Journal/CARLA VARISCO Susan Durham, of Dover, has started a Web site registry that helps other black-market babies search for their parents and their history. For Susan Durham's web site click now

Susan Durham celebrates her birthday on Feb. 1, but she's not sure whether that is when she was born.

Her birth certificate says she was born in Kansas. She knows that's a lie.

Where other people have a family history, Durham has a void.

Durham, a 50-year-old Dover resident, is a black-market baby. Her adoptive parents essentially bought her shortly after her birth, and she has spent the last 16 years trying to determine her origins.

Not only is she using the power of the Internet to help in her search, but she also has started a Web page to help other black-market babies reclaim their past.

Durham is far from alone: Her Web page has received nearly 20,000 "hits," and her Black Market Adoptees' Registry carries queries from black-market babies from coast to coast.

Some were born in a time when black-market baby rings were notorious and the people who ran them made hundreds of thousands of dollars by selling infants for a few hundred dollars.

Black-market baby rings were common in the 1930s through the 1960s, though the practice of selling babies persists today. 

Adoption experts say there is no way to tell how many of the 50,000 U.S. adoptions a year are illegal, but healthy Caucasian babies today can bring $100,000 on the illicit market, said Joe Soll, a 60-year-old New York psychotherapist who was a black-market baby and whose practice deals mainly with adoptees.

Susan Durham

"Babies are commodities. Cash commodities," said Peggy Bohannon, a Dover resident whose Web site helps Delaware adoptees and their birth parents get in touch.

"It still does go on. You can find [black-market babies] on the Internet," Bohannon said.

"My adoption was a complicated one," she said at the kitchen table of her north Dover home.

A small-town Kansas physician named Dr. Mary Townsend-Glassen arranged Durham's adoption. The birth certificate Townsend-Glassen signed states that she delivered Durham in her office in Phillipsburg, Kan.

During a visit to Phillipsburg, Durham said she told her mother she had a strange feeling, almost as if she had walked past her birth mother.

"You weren't born in Phillipsburg," she said her mother replied.

Durham said her mother later handed her a book written by Townsend-Glassen and told her she might find it interesting.

The book contained information about how the doctor, who was revered as "Dr. Mary," had helped unwed mothers find good homes for their babies at a time when contraception was uncommon, abortion was virtually unavailable and the social stigma of illegitimacy was overwhelming.

Susan Durham

Pressing her reluctant mother for details, Durham learned that she had been born in Lincoln, Neb. Her adoptive parents, whose names Durham did not disclose, had worked through Dr. Mary to get a baby. 

"I know there was money exchanged for me. I don't know how much," Durham said.

"The instructions given to my parents were to go to Lincoln, ask for a certain doctor and give him the money, and he would give them the baby," she said.

The adoptive parents then took newborn Susan back to Phillipsburg, where Dr. Mary signed a birth certificate listing them as the baby's birth parents, thus avoiding the need for a legal adoption.

Durham's family moved to Oregon when she was 5, and in 1958 her father, a banker, was the victim of a blackmail attempt centering on her "adoption," Durham said. That's when Durham's parents hired a lawyer and legally adopted her, using the documentation that had been furnished by Dr. Mary. The doctor died in the 1970s.

The family moved to Alaska, where Susan met Harlan Durham, an airman from Dover.

They married in 1969, moved to Delaware and had two daughters: Taunja Durham, now 28, and Teena Friend, 25.

Durham said she had a happy childhood and loving parents. She likes her job working with children as an instructional aide in the Capital School District. She has a family she loves and a comfortable home.

But something was missing.

"I started to feel that gnawing, that I needed to know a little bit more about myself," Durham said. "I didn't feel like I was complete. There were too many open ends."

Susan Durham

She began making inquiries, a telephone call here, a letter there. The deeper she dug, the more she learned about the time a half century ago when American babies where shipped from state to state for money, often through arrangements made by elaborate rings.

A 1950 investigation determined that Tann had grossed an estimated $1 million supplying babies to out-of-state residents.

Brooklyn, N.Y., housewife Bessie Bernard ran another baby peddling ring in the 1940s.

She paid young unwed mothers, mainly in Southern states, from $100 to $300 for their babies. Her clients would pay roughly $2,000 for the babies. Bernard's operation flourished until New York police smashed it in 1949.

Bernard was sentenced to a year in prison and fined $2,500.

Soll, the Conyers, N.Y., psychotherapist and author, was a Bessie Bernard baby who believes he has traced his delivery to a Delaware physician. That doctor's name appears on the birth certificates of several black-market babies, Soll said.

Soll tried to trace his own roots, but has found no real leads. Even a segment about Soll on television's "Unsolved Mysteries" failed to bring forth any new information. So, like Durham, Soll helps others in their quest.

Not knowing one's roots can lead to a sense of emptiness. Other people know their ethnic origins, but black-market babies do not.

"I don't know what day to march in what parade," Soll said. "I'm being flip in a way, but my life has been a struggle."

Black-market babies' lack of information can exact a physical toll as well as an emotional one.

Durham is more interested in learning her family medical history than in finding the woman who bore her. But still, there is that lingering question: Who was she?

"I felt so much better about my adoption once I found out I was not the only one," Durham said.

She launched her Web site to give adoptees a place to post information in the hope that someone will provide a lead.

Durham's Web page also has photographs of long-gone maternity homes, photographs that for some adoptees are the only tangible link to their past.

"I have had some people say what a good feeling it was for them to see these pictures," Durham said. "Those e-mails give me goose bumps."

Durham's search might be nearing an end: She has located two grandchildren of Dr. Mary who might be willing to help.

"There is a piece of me missing," she said. "I hope I find mine."