Learning Someone's True Name

I have a few cousins who were adopted. I haven't seen any of them for many years. But I used to see them relatively often when we were kids. One of them, a female, is dead now. I actually saw her obit online today. I already knew she was dead but I don't think about it that often.

Today I've been researching some family connections -- with some up close researching tools, that are still not all that great, meaning online newspapers from the past. I found out where an aunt was born, finding a tiny tiny little newspaper article, four or five lines, telling about her. Apparently the rest of the family had never seen it.

In the course of this I found one little article, also a very small one, that included my adopted cousins' name before they were adopted. I'd never heard it before, so it was a complete surprise to me. I guess since I was just a tiny kid at the time, a toddler, that it never really occurred to me that they had a different family's name. I hadn't ever heard it.

But there was this one little article -- and there is not two articles out there, at least with the resources as they presently stand -- that gave their name. I was stunned that such information was out there and in such a limited way, one tiny little article that has that kind of revelation.

I'd like to ask my mom if she knows their original family name. It's nothing weird or anything, it's just a normal name. But it's weird that you can go over 50 years without ever hearing it once, then there it is, in an obscure article on the internet.

You wouldn't think that would happen.