Adopted at birth and brought up Pākehā, I discovered as an adult that I have Ngāi Tahu tūpuna (ancestors). Adoptees seek birth kin and stories to try to fill the gaps and absences that haunt us, so I undertook my roots journey, travelling three times to Riverton/Aparima, where my ancestors had lived, taking my video camera. In this article I describe how initially I did not find the belonging I was looking for, but through my creative practice of filmmaking, and the three short videos I made, I did connect to place, and began making a new history for myself.

German scholars contributed an impressive amount to many different disciplines in their studies of German East Africa and other German colonies, particularly between about 1890 and 1910. Much research was undertaken and a considerable amount was published. Then, after the First World War, when Germany lost her colonies, some valuable work was abandoned. One important project which suffered was the collection of data on customary law in the former German colonies. The sets of answers to a questionnaire were the main source used in compiling a large two volume study,Das Eingeborenenrecht(1929 and 1930), which is available in research libraries outside Germany. However, the original printed sets of answers are a more valuable source of ethnographic and legal data than the book; but they are little known and appear to have been generally unavailable outside Germany and Tanganyika. Rhodes House Library, Oxford, now has a copy of the original German questionnaire and a microfilm of the sets of answers for German East Africa. The purpose of this article is to explain how the original German research project developed, to present an English translation of the final version of the questionnaire (see Appendix A, below), a check list of the most important facts about each of the sets of answers collected in German East Africa (see Appendix B, below), and a brief assessment of the value of this data.This research is interesting when it is seen from any of the following points of view;

Adoptees can experience pervasive feelings of not-belonging, absence, and loss (Verrier, 1993); however, precious objects can help alleviate these feelings. Russell Belk (1998) argues that some objects come to be seen as part of the self. For writers Christine Rogers and Laura Fulton, a handkerchief taken from a birthfather, and a teddy bear gifted by a special uncle, helped create belonging and connection. In this article, Rogers and Fulton introduce their cherished objects and explore the complex layers of attachment that their items generate and express. Rogers and Fulton argue that these things are haunted (Brown, Reavey & Brookfield, 2014), invested with power and rich with meaning. For Rogers, the stolen handkerchief expresses her fear that the attachment to her birthfather was not stable or permanent, and embroidering the handkerchief acknowledged and helped transform this adoption fear. For Fulton, a teddy bear was the conduit for her complex thoughts and feelings when she was brought into a new family as a toddler. It was the bear who helped her storytelling practices, which were a way of addressing and understanding the silence and loss of her adoption.

Through short essay films, Christine Rogers and Catherine Gough-Brady, creative practice researchers and filmmakers, attempt to collaborate with each other and the theories of ethnographers and documentarians David and Judith MacDougall. Christine and Catherine use the writing and films of the MacDougall’s as prompts to turn their attention to the processes of filming. Christine speaks to how holding the camera viewfinder to her face can manufacture belonging, and at other times, provide welcome distancing. Catherine explores observational filmmaking as a methodology that can applied to other endeavours, for instance academia. Alongside this, Catherine uses this film to explore how to create a visual dialogue (or collaboration) between filmic elements within the film. Because of their divergent responses the final works by Christine and Catherine become related rather than collaborative. They reveal that this may result from them both allowing research questions to arise as part of their independent creative processes, rather than being set at the outset.

This article explores the loss, legacy, and liberatory possibilities of addressing adoption through collaborative autoethnographic writing. We invite readers, through critical autoethnographic narratives and scholarship, to engage with our lived experiences as both cultural and familial histories. The return to the pre-adoption place of origin will not give us the closure we seek, so here we explore the future-making potential of collective adoptee narratives. If home may be less of an origin and more of a destination, each of the four authors engages in this autoethnographic research as a creative and collaborative means of finding a way toward becoming-home.