DavisDNA and Family Research

12/28/2025

Gravestone of Daniel and Mindwell Phelps, 1777 and 1775, at Palisado Cemetery in Windsor, Connecticut. Carved by Ebenezer Drake.

12/28/2025

As 2025 comes to a close, we’re continuing to share some of the stories that were read and reflected on by many in our community this year.

This story was shared by James Axiotis, who was adopted from Athens, Greece. It was originally shared earlier this year. We can see how much this story connected with so many!

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I was born in Athens, Greece, in June 1963 to an u***d mother named Georgia Korakis. On paper, I was deemed “illegitimate.” I was simply a baby boy who arrived in the wrong era for a woman to raise a child alone. After a week in the hospital, my mother handed me over to the authorities. At the time, Greece did not support single mothers. There was no safety net, no housing, no real path for a woman like her to keep a child like me.

Instead, there was a system. Looking back now, we know it became one of the largest adoption scandals of its time. Between the late 1950s and 1960s, thousands of Greek children were sent abroad, many to the United States. The numbers vary, but estimates often range from 5,000 to 7,000. I am one of those children.

For the first 16 months of my life, I was in care—unnamed, in an orphanage and foster care—waiting. In 1964, I was adopted by Greek American parents who brought me to Southern California. They gave me a name, a home, and a life I could never have imagined from that hospital ward in Athens.

I grew up in Granada Hills, in the San Fernando Valley, with a backyard, a pool, a dog, and two loving parents who did their best, even through their own struggles. I was raised Greek in all the ways that matter: faith, food, family, and a healthy dose of guilt and humor. But I was also raised American, with opportunity and freedom I never take for granted.

At 13, I stumbled onto a TV set as an extra in an ABC Afterschool Special, and something sparked. That one experience turned into a 40-year career in television and film production. I’ve worked my way up from production assistant to producer, served two terms on the National Board of the Producers Guild of America, and am a member of the Television Academy and BAFTA’s Academy Circle. None of that happens if I’m not adopted. None of it.

I am deeply pro-adoption because I am living proof of how transformative it can be. My adoption took me from an uncertain beginning in Athens to a life in Los Angeles that allowed me to build a career, raise three daughters, and tell stories for a living.

I recognize that not every adoptee feels that way. Adoption is complicated. It carries grief, loss, identity questions, and, in my case, a whole country’s painful history. I honor that complexity. I respect every adoptee’s experience, especially those whose stories look very different from mine.

Like many of us, I searched. I did DNA testing, hired a genealogist, chased leads, and pulled every thread I could find. I never found my father. I never found my mother either, beyond her name: Georgia Korakis. Today, based on what I’ve learned, I believe she has passed away. I never got to go back, look her in the eyes, and say the words that sit in my heart every day: “Thank you. You saved my life.”

So I’m doing the next best thing I know how to do: I’m telling her story. I’m currently developing a short film called Georgia, based on the true event of my mother going to court to say goodbye to me before I was released for adoption. I was a baby. I remember none of it. But I have carried the weight of that moment my whole life.

The film is set against the backdrop of the Greek adoption scandal of the late ’50s and ’60s, when vulnerable mothers were pushed into impossible decisions and children were shipped abroad, often without full consent or transparency. Georgia is my way of honoring the woman who chose life for me, even at great personal cost. It is also my way of shining a light on a chapter of history that affected thousands of us and is only now starting to be fully acknowledged.

I share my story here, with I’m Adopted, because this community understands the layers. We know what it means to be both grateful and grieving, both “chosen” and carrying questions that may never be answered. We hold the tension between loving our adoptive families and wondering about our first families. We know what it is to live between worlds.

I want to say this to my fellow adoptees around the world: Your story matters. Your questions are valid. Your gratitude, your anger, your confusion, your peace—all of it belongs. There is no one “right” adoption narrative. There is only your truth and the courage to live it.

My truth is this: Adoption changed my life in beautiful ways. I was rescued from a situation that could have ended very differently. I was given loving parents, a home, a craft I adore, and three daughters who are my heart. And yet, at the center of all that blessing is a quiet, unseen woman named Georgia, who walked into a courtroom in Athens in 1964 and did the hardest thing a mother can do.

I couldn’t find her to thank her. So I will spend the rest of my life making sure her sacrifice was not in vain, by telling the story of children like me and mothers like her.

- James Axiotis (Adopted from Athens, Greece, now living in the East Coast, USA)

12/28/2025

Thinking ahead to your genealogy goals for next year starts now. Registration is open for the NGS 2026 Family History Conference, and early bird rates end 28 February 2026.

The Conference brings genealogists together in Fort Wayne for learning, collaboration, and dedicated research time in one of the country’s premier genealogy destinations. Register today and save with the early bird rate. https://conference.ngsgenealogy.org/

12/28/2025

Welcome home, Tech. Sgt. Donald Arthur Dorman. Honored to have researched your family. (2014/2023)

12/28/2025

In the middle of the Civil War, a Black woman named Mary Jane Richards made a choice that could have cost her everything.
She chose to go back.
Born into slavery in Richmond, Virginia, Mary had been freed by Elizabeth Van Lew, the daughter of her former owners. Van Lew was an abolitionist hiding in plain sight—a wealthy white woman in the Confederate capital who secretly despised everything the South stood for.
Van Lew had recognized Mary's intelligence early and sent her north to be educated. She even arranged for Mary to travel to Liberia as a missionary. By the time Mary returned to Richmond in 1860, she was literate, worldly, and free.
But she came back to a city about to tear itself apart.
When the Civil War erupted, Van Lew began organizing one of the most audacious spy networks of the war. Operating from her mansion in the heart of the Confederate capital, she gathered intelligence from clerks, servants, and sympathizers across Richmond. The information she collected reached Union generals, including Ulysses S. Grant himself.
Mary became one of her most valuable operatives.
The exact nature of Mary's espionage remains shrouded in mystery. The federal government destroyed most records of Southern spies after the war to protect them from retaliation. What we know comes from fragments: diary entries, newspaper accounts, and oral histories passed down through generations.
We know that Van Lew wrote in her diary: "When I open my eyes in the morning, I say to the servant, 'What news, Mary?' and my caterer never fails!"
We know that Mary entered the Confederate White House on at least one occasion, pretending to collect laundry while searching for documents.
We know that she was part of a network that gathered intelligence on troop movements, supply shortages, and Confederate strategy—information that helped the Union army make critical decisions.
And we know that the value of Van Lew's spy ring was acknowledged by Union generals Butler, Grant, and Sharpe.
What we don't know is almost everything else.
The stories that have grown up around Mary—the photographic memory, the permanent placement as Jefferson Davis's servant, the daily reading of documents on his desk—come from sources historians consider unreliable. A 1911 magazine article based on the faulty memory of Van Lew's niece. An oral history not written down until 1952, three generations removed from the events it describes.
The truth is both more frustrating and more fascinating.
Mary Jane Richards used multiple names throughout her life. She gave contradictory accounts of her own story, embellishing or altering details depending on her audience. After the war, she gave lectures in New York about her experiences, using the name "Richmonia Richards." She worked as a teacher for freed slaves in Virginia, Florida, and Georgia.
Then, in 1867, she wrote a letter saying she planned to join her husband in the West Indies.
And she vanished from history.
No record of her death exists. No photograph of her has been definitively identified. The woman circulated for decades as "Mary Bowser" turned out to be someone else entirely—a different Mary Bowser, born decades later.
In 1995, the U.S. Army inducted her into the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame, calling her "one of the highest placed and most productive espionage agents of the Civil War."
But even they got her name wrong.
This is the reality of history for Black women in 19th-century America. Their contributions were so systematically overlooked, so deliberately undocumented, that even when we try to honor them, we struggle to get the basic facts right.
What remains certain is this:
Mary Jane Richards was a free Black woman who chose to return to the Confederate capital during the most dangerous years of American history. She worked within a spy network that operated under the noses of Confederate leadership. She gathered intelligence that aided the Union cause. And she did all of this knowing that if caught, she would face ex*****on.
She didn't do it for recognition. She couldn't have—recognition would have meant death.
She did it because the system that had enslaved her was fighting to survive, and she wanted to help destroy it.
The stories we tell about her have grown into legend. The photographic memory. The documents memorized word for word. The Confederate president raging about leaks while the woman clearing his dishes smiled quietly to herself.
These details may be embellishments. Historians aren't sure.
But here's what isn't legend:
A Black woman, in a time when her humanity was legally denied, risked everything to help end the institution that had imprisoned her people.
And then she disappeared before anyone could properly thank her.
Sometimes the most powerful acts of resistance are the ones that leave no trace.
Mary Jane Richards left almost none.
But the Confederacy fell anyway.

~Old Photo Club

12/28/2025

12/28/2025

There are many potential steps involved in researching your genealogy, especially if you’re starting from scratch. Before you do anything else, it’s of %

12/28/2025

IGRS Top Research Tip #187: The earliest records in the Belfast City Burial Index date from 1869 and are drawn from three council run sites. The data includes dates of death, ages, addresses, and plot numbers. For older records, scans from the registers can be purchased too: https://www.belfastcity.gov.uk/burialrecords
Burial records | Belfast City Council
Information about the burial records and other historical records we hold, how to search them and frequently asked questions.
*PLEASE FOLLOW, LIKE & SHARE* *

12/28/2025

12/26/2025

Finding Your Ancestors in the Official Federal Land Records Site (BLM GLO Records) (New Quicksheet)

The Official Federal Land Records Site—commonly called the BLM GLO Records site—is one of the most important land research tools available to genealogists. It documents the transfer of federal public land into private ownership, primarily in states created from public-domain land. This site may contain the original land patent that put that land into your ancestor’s hands.

Get the Quicksheet PDF at https://theancestorhunt.com/blog/finding-your-ancestors-in-the-official-federal-land-records-site-blm-glo-records/