Goring man’s search for birth family ‘blew my mind’

Bryan Urbick knew he was adopted from an early age.

Brought up in Seattle by a strict Catholic couple, Mr Urbick knew very little about his birth family.

But he had a nagging feeling that he did not “fit in”, and, almost six decades later and settled in Goring, Oxfordshire, he decided the time had come for him to find some answers.

Mr Urbick knew he was the result of an affair, and his mother, who had three other children, put him up for adoption to save her marriage.

But attempts to contact her in Washington state – which has strict laws about contacting birth family – were unsuccessful.

“I suspect she didn’t want to relive the past,” the 64-year-old told BBC Radio Berkshire.

“[But it was a] tough blow to be rejected again.”

His search was reignited after the death of his adoptive mother.

After the funeral, a DNA test revealed he had a lot of cousins, which allowed him to figure out his father was a man called Boyd Carter.

One of Mr Urbick’s newly discovered cousins, Craig Moe, told him he had grown up with his father, whom he called Uncle Boyd.

When Mr Moe came to visit him in January 2025, the Henley Standard covered it – and from there, things started to snowball.

“The reporter… rang and said: Bryan, I have the most amazing news,” said Mr Urbick.

A man had rung the newspaper saying Mr Carter had been a family friend.

The reporter put the two in touch – and Mr Urbick discovered the man lived less than four miles away from him, in Whitchurch-on-Thames.

“It just blows my mind a bit that this would happen so close to us,” he said.

Mr Urbick is still yet to meet the man who got in touch, but said he had already learned so much about his dad, who died in 2014.

He said he learned his father was a perfectionist like him, that they both loved boats, and that their handwriting looked the same.

“And I have weird handwriting,” he said.

But he said learning more about his dad had been “emotional”.

“I don’t think he ever knew that I existed,” he said.

He also learned his dad had had another son, who had died aged nine.

“I wish that I had been able to be a son to him as well,” he said.

But despite this, Mr Urbick said finding out about his dad had helped him feel connected to his birth family.

“I never fit and now I feel like ‘gosh, I fit somewhere’, and that’s rather exhilarating,” he said.