Occasionally I will watch the show “Unsolved Mysteries”. They will have segments on families who were separated during the depression or because of a war, or friends that have lost touch with each other, or similar situations, and then they show the people all getting together again after a 20 or 30 year (or more) separation. And it got me thinking, what if the person who has been “lost” doesn’t want to be found? Do the producers of the show go to the “found” person first and say, “Your family has been looking for you, here’s their info, and we want to film your reumion for our show.” Or do they give all the info to the people who are looking first? What if they find a “lost” person and that person says, “I ran away from home thirty years ago and I have no interest in seeing my family again, go away.”?
Does anyone know what the procedure is, or has anyone been through that type of “lost and found” situation? I dont’ know why it interests me, but it would make an interesting story (a long-lost relative being “found” and then not wanting to be “found”).
I can well imagine how a mother who gave a child up for adoption or someone from an abusive relationship may wish to remain
unfound, even going as far as employing legal procedures as
obstacles to a search.
I believe an individual’s right to privacy is pre-eminent here.
Is someone chooses not to be found, that’s all there is to it.
Wasn’t there some sports figure in the news whose bio. dad found him, but the athlete ignored the dad because the dad abandoned the family years earlier?
You might be thinking of Shaquille O’Neal, whose biological dad sorta abandoned Shaq & his mom, but then his mom married herslef an ARMY man, and it was nothing but discipline, discipline, discipline for Shaq from then on.
And of course, after Shaq was ranking in cash by the tractor-trailer load, his “real dad” poked his head up. Shaq wrote a fairly horrible rap song about it called “Biological Didn’t Bother,” which is found on Shaq-Fu: The return, which has to be one of the dumbest album titles EVER!!!
There was a local guy here who just left his family. He did not want to be found. At first they thought maybe he was dead but someone he knew ran into him about 800 miles away. He eventually came back to town after about 18 months and divorced his wife.
If you are an adult and you suddenly disappear the police will assume that maybe a crime was involved. But if they figure out there is no crime they probably will stop looking for you.
They can find you, but they can’t force you to re-unite with or respond to whomever it is that is looking for you. I believe that when Unsolved Mysteries runs across one of these in the course of finding someone else who DOES want to re-unite, they have a sort of euphemism they use: something like “a brother who preferred not to be interviewed for this program”. Of couirse, if the brother or whomever was the principal/sole object of the search, then they don’t have an airable segment and so you as the audience never know about the unhappy non-reunion.
I worked with a lady named Jackie. One day we were in the office and Jackie told us she was sick of this job and was gonna leave. We thought she was joking. She later failed to turn up for work.
When my boss called 3 days later her roommate and found out she told her something similar and she hadn’t seen her in a while.
The cops said when a person over 18 says they are leaving and they go, they aren’t missing they’ve left.