The Support Service Series showcases Find & Connect Services in each state. Here you can get an idea of what happens after you contact a service, their contact details, some information about them, and what to expect when you apply for records.
The Find & Connect support service in Queensland provides a range of services for adults who spent time in institutional or other types of out-of-home care as children. We support care leavers who live in Queensland, regardless of where they were in “care”.
The question common to almost everyone trying to find out about their childhood is ‘why did I go into care?’ To try and answer this question, the first thing we usually do is to apply for any records that may be available. The information in the records can provide a timeline of a person’s childhood. That time line may make it possible to look at the histories of other family members to gain a better understanding of what may have been happening at particular points in time for the family.
Care records may inform family history work or provide information that is important to progress family tracing work. For a person who was in care to understand what happened to them, it takes tracing back their own records, discovering their family history, and using those records to build up a picture of their childhood.
Many families became separated as a consequence of the out-of-home care system. Through the Find & Connect program we also offer family tracing where Care Leavers were separated from siblings, parents or grandparents. Finding some family members can be a quite a fast process. Other times it may be much more challenging and take a much longer time.
People have different motivations for wanting to discover more about their own, and their family’s history. Family connections and knowledge of family history and family stories is something that is often taken for granted by those who didn’t spend time in out-of-home care. Discovering your family history can improve a person’s sense of connectedness, solve some mysteries or uncover a person’s ethnic heritage.
To contact Lotus Place, please call 1800 16 11 109 or email lotus@micahprojects.org.au
–-thanks to Lachlan Douglas for authoring this post.
