The Adoption Chain is an adoptee-centered podcast built around one simple idea: each guest shares their own experience and then introduces us to another adoptee who becomes the next link in the chain.
The conversations can include identity, family secrets, DNA discoveries, reunion, biological and adoptive family, belonging, culture, grief, anger, humor, healing, and the questions that can follow an adoptee throughout life. There is no single correct adoption story—and no required way for an adoptee to feel.
Adoption is often described with simple words: lucky, chosen, loved, saved, given away, found. Real lives are rarely that simple.
The Adoption Chain makes room for the full story—the good parts, the difficult parts, the humor, grief, gratitude, anger, uncertainty, discovery, and everything in between.
Donald is a late-discovery adoptee who learned at age fifty that he had been adopted. An AncestryDNA test led him to his biological family and began a complicated journey through secrecy, identity, reunion, loss, and discovering an entirely new version of himself in middle age.
Raised in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, Donald is an attorney, writer, storyteller, and author of the forthcoming memoir Ballad of the Interloper.
Scott is Donald’s longtime friend and fellow adoptee. Raised in Arkansas and Oklahoma by his adoptive parents, Ray and Dixie Smith, Scott grew up alongside a sister who was also adopted.
He brings warmth, humor, curiosity, and his own adoptee perspective to conversations about the many different ways people understand their families, identities, and personal histories.
The Adoption Chain exists to give adoptees space to tell their stories in their own words—honest, unfiltered, and without being asked to fit anyone else’s version of adoption.
Our goal is to follow those connections from city to city, state to state, and eventually around the world.
Every adoptee is a link. Every link has a story.
