Ontario man finds his birth parents 55 years after being adopted

Alex Proctor was 55 years old before he knew who he truly was. Raised in Timmins and Oakville, he knew he was adopted in the 1960s but knew nothing of his ancestry, nothing of his heritage, not even his health records.

“I knew nothing about where I came from or who my parents were. I was adopted. My mother was white. My dad was Black,” Proctor told CityNews. “I was told that both my parents were very young and they wanted the very best that could happen as far as my life. And that’s why they put me up for adoption.”

On the outside, his life with his adopted family looked ideal with two parents, a posh home and lots of siblings, but the idyllic suburban family was not what it seemed.

“It was a source of a lot of pain.” Proctor recalls getting into a fight with his brother who he shared a bedroom with. When his parents decided to separate the two of them, they decided Proctor’s new bedroom would be in the crawlspace basement.

“To this day, I mean, I’m a lot better, but the dark has always been a problem with me because of that. You always ask yourself why? You know, why would someone do that? There’s no explanation for that.”

Proctor said his relationship with his adoptive parents was nonexistent. “There was really no relationship. You were just there … I felt that I was a burden.”

“My adoptive parents drank a lot every day. In fact, the clearest memories I have of them are with a rock glass, literally always in their hand,” shared Proctor. “As a kid, you’re like, ‘Why do they hate me so much? What am I doing so wrong?’ It’s horrible. [I was] so lonely and lost.”

With seemingly no other option, Proctor started acting out trying to get his parents’ attention and when that didn’t work, the police connected Proctor with the Children’s Aid Society (CAS). He ended up in a group home.

“That first night was pretty rough. It’s pretty rough. Nothing can prepare you for something like that,” explained Proctor. “You don’t even know what’s going on in that group home. I slept with one eye open. I got a knife under my bed. I said, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore.’ I said, ‘Who am I going to call?’ I got out of there. I never went back … I couldn’t do it anymore. Just too weird. It was too painful.”

Between the ages of 12 and 18, he lived in at least a dozen different placements.

“I moved around so many times. I can’t remember the places, the people, the names. I mean, you would think you would, but it’s just so many in your head.”

When he was 15 years old, Proctor tried looking for his family through CAS. “I gave them all the information I knew, which was very little. You know, my mom’s name was White, which I thought was right. And they said, ‘Okay, well, what we can do is we open up an investigation and we’ll let your surviving parents know that you’re looking for them and we’ll get back to you’.”

“So it was a phone call you were waiting for, [and I] never got it,” said Proctor.

Defeated, Proctor gave up on looking for his family and resolved to be a lone wolf until his partner Mary stepped in.

“Even though he was a well-rounded person, I felt like something was missing. I couldn’t give him the love that I feel like a family could,” said Mary who decided to get him a genetic genealogy kit in hopes of finding his family.

Proctor said it was a very difficult decision to make to go through with the test.

“When you’re in my position, when you’re in an adoptive situation that didn’t go well, it’s hard to think about family that way. It’s not always going to end up the way you think. It is not going to be a fairy tale.”

He eventually decided to complete the kit and Mary set up a profile. Shortly after, one Saturday morning, she received a notification.

“We’re just put our hands on the table, held each other’s hands. And I said, ‘This is it, babe. These are your parents.’ And he was like, ‘How do you know? How do you know?’ And I said, ‘Well, it says a 50 per cent match for each parent’,” shared Mary.

“I didn’t fully believe that the whole thing was actually coming to fruition,” explained Proctor.

Proctor discovered he has not only found his parents, but a lineage that was so steeped in the history that it makes up an important part of the Canadian fabric.

You can join Proctor on his journey to discover his past in ‘VeraCity: The Long Road Home’ on Sunday, Feb 26 at 10 p.m. ET on Citytv.

With files from Meredith Bond of CityNews