Kian Lafford was adopted from Omsk, Russia in September 2007. Born Valeriy Nikolaevich, he later received the name Kian after being adopted into an Irish family.

Growing up in a small town with a large Eastern European community made it easier for Kian to be open about his adoption and his background. His story, however, took a difficult turn in January 2024 when his mother passed away after a battle with a brain tumour. In reflecting on that loss, Kian began to see an unexpected connection between grief and adoption.

Since then, Kian decided to try learn more through DNA testing. While it did not provide all the answers he was hoping for, it offered him a huge insight into his genetic background and marked the beginning of a deeper journey into understanding where he comes from.

From our An Adoption Story series. You can watch her documentary story on Alex Gilbert's YouTube channel. Oksana Rennie was born in 1991 in a small village in the western part of Russia’s Smolensk region. In 1996, at five and a half years old, she was adopted from the Smolensk District Children’s Home by her parents and raised in the city of Christchurch in New Zealand.

Growing up far from her birthplace, she wanted to fit in like any other New Zealand child, while carrying only fragments of memory from her early years in Russia.

In her early thirties, after becoming a mother herself, Oksana began searching for answers about what happened before she entered the children’s home. With very little information too, she uncovers unexpected connections to her birth family, including a sister and cousin she never knew existed.This is her story.

James Axiotis was born in Athens, Greece, to an unwed mother named Georgia Korakis. With no support for single mothers at the time, he was handed over to the authorities after a week in the hospital.

Between the late 1950s and 1960s, thousands of Greek children were sent abroad, many to the United States. The numbers vary, but estimates often range from 5,000 to 7,000. James was one of those children.

James shares with us his adoption story, his search for identity, and the inspiration behind his short film Georgia, a tribute to the mother he never got to thank.