Please consider what you may be doing before making contact

I can sympathize with those looking for siblings they never knew about who have been adopted, but I would also like to suggest that you be considerate. Years ago, long after my mother had passed away, my sister was contacted my someone claiming to be our half-sister. We were stunned by this claim. We later learned that my mother had 2 children we never knew about that she gave up for adoption, and this woman was one of them. To say that this revelation was devastating to us would be putting it mildly. It turns out that these were closed adoptions, but my adopted half-sister had contacted some group online, and they had gone digging into information they had no business having access to to tell her who her birth family was, and that is how she found us. She had always know she was adopted, so she had her whole life to learn to deal with this, but this was thrown at us out of the blue. We told her we needed a bit of time to come to terms with this, but she didn't care & tried to force her way into our lives, only caring about what she wanted. She would call us, yelling at us because we didn't immediately welcome her with open arms. She went on rants about how unfair it was that we got to be raised my our birth mother & she didn't. We asked her if her adopted parents loved her and took good care of her, and she said they did. We then tried to tell her about how hard our life was, and how bad we had it, about how we were abused by our stepfather and that she was probably much better off than we were, but she didn't want to hear it. Honestly, the woman is unstable, and I have had no choice but to avoid her. Where I live, you can go to the courthouse and register if you are looking for your birth parents/ adopted siblings/ adopted child, and you will be put into a registry so that if they are also looking you can find each other. This is what she should have done, but instead she went digging knowing that our mother never intended her to have access to the information she got. She never once considered how this would affect our lives, and to this day she still doesn't care. If my mother had still been alive when all of this happened, she would have been almost 78 years old. The way this woman went about things probably would have caused her so much stress that it would have killed her, and I have no doubt that she wouldn't have cared what it did to my mom. My point is, when you go into something like this blind, you may be opening a can of worms, and you never know what the repercussions may be.