About Me
I came to this work the way most meaningful work arrives — through necessity, and then through love of it.
At 27, I discovered I had been adopted. No one had ever told me. The revelation made sense of a lifetime of incongruities: stories that didn't hold together, a family I bore no resemblance to, and a quiet, persistent feeling I had carried since childhood that something fundamental didn't add up.
A year later I decided to go looking. I had almost nothing to work with — two words on a document I obtained from a records office: "infant Tavis." That was my original last name. From those two data points I reconstructed my family tree on both sides, back to great-great-great-great-great-grandparents. I found my birth parents, met siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, and a grandmother. I learned things about myself that I had wondered about my entire life.
The process was a hunt, and I took to it with everything I had. I learned how the bureaucracies that hold our records actually function — which offices hold what, how requests move through systems, where the gaps are and how to work around them. I was tenacious, creative, and occasionally quite inventive in navigating obstacles. It was some of the most absorbing work I have ever done.
Several things serve me well in this work. I am a published author — my memoir, The Good Life Lab, received a Nautilus Award — and I have always been drawn to true stories, the kind that reveal what people are actually made of. I am a portrait painter, which has given me an unusual ability to read and retain faces — I once recognized someone in a grocery checkout line in New Mexico as a person I had briefly met at a party in New York City more than twelve years before. I spent decades as a professional event producer, work that required managing extraordinary complexity, tracking countless moving parts, and finding paths through situations that seemed to have none. I am deeply pattern-sensitive. And I have always been able to hold a goal with enough conviction that obstacles become, simply, problems to solve.
30 Years Later, Citizenship
In recent years I returned to my own ancestry research with a specific aim: determining whether I held citizenship pathways in other countries. I found three — Portugal, Sweden, and Canada. I learned the laws governing each, navigated amendments stretching back more than a century, and obtained every document needed to support my claims — including my sealed adoption record. That last part surprises people. Sealed records can be obtained. I know how.
I believe this is important work. Knowing where you come from — and who — is a form of self-knowledge that nothing else can fully replace. And the ability to live where you will thrive, even if that place is across an ocean, is something more people have access to than they realize. Helping people find that access, and that knowledge, is work I find genuinely meaningful. It is, in its own way, a form of provenance.