Finding Home: Lost Child of Louise Wise
How secrecy, science, and silence stole my husband’s history—and what the records still hide.
By Alexander Ziwahatan
Knowing Where You Come From
Most families can trace their stories through photographs and names passed from one generation to the next.
My husband, Josh, could not. His beginnings were sealed inside a folder owned by strangers. He was adopted through Louise Wise Services, once praised as the premier Jewish adoption agency in New York.
For decades its name meant respectability—until people began to learn what had been hidden behind locked cabinets.
Josh’s adoptive mother, a kind and open-hearted woman, always encouraged him to search for his birth family.
But he never did—not until he married me.
I’m a historian by training and our family genealogist by calling.
When we learned in 2023 that the Governor of New York had finally unsealed pre-adoption birth certificates, I told him this was our moment.
For the first time in his life, the truth wasn’t locked away by law.
Together, we decided to open that door.
The Paper That Weighed a Lifetime
In December 2023 a thin certified envelope arrived.
Inside lay his pre-adoption birth certificate.
On it was the name he’d never heard spoken aloud—David Eric Sachs—and beneath it, his mother’s signature: Judith Sachs.
The line for father was blank. That empty space became the center of our lives.
He held the paper like something alive. One sheet of paper rewrote everything he’d been told about who he was.
A Glimpse Through the Door
During the adoption itself, chance slipped through the cracks.
Josh’s Louise Wise caseworker left the adoption file open on her desk while stepping out of the room.
His adoptive mother, alone for a few seconds, glanced down and read two lines:
Father – Italian. Died in Vietnam.
Name – David Eric Sachs
Though, his adoptive mother would later forget his birth name.
That was the only truth that escaped the agency’s control.
For years it was all anyone knew—just one sentence, fragile and forbidden—but enough to keep hope alive.
A Hidden Connection
When the adoption papers were finally signed, Josh was placed with Joel and Roberta — the parents who would raise him with love and devotion.
What no one knew then, and what only DNA later revealed, is that Joel was actually Josh’s cousin.
The man who became his father by law was already connected to him by blood.
Within our family, we’ve often wondered whether this was coincidence or design.
Given the agency’s emphasis on “careful selection,” and the fact that they held both family trees, we believe that Louise Wise Services knew Joel was Josh’s cousin when they approved the match.
If true, it means they orchestrated not just an adoption, but a quiet reunion—one that neither side was allowed to understand.
It’s a detail that haunts us still, a reminder that even in secrecy, truth sometimes finds its own way home.
What no one knew then, and what only DNA later revealed, is that Joel was actually Josh’s cousin.
The man who became his father by law was already connected to him by blood.
Given the agency’s emphasis on “careful selection,” and the fact that they held both family trees, we believe that Louise Wise Services knew Joel was Josh’s cousin when they approved the match.
If true, it means they orchestrated not just an adoption, but a quiet reunion—one that neither side was allowed to understand.
It’s a detail that haunts us still, a reminder that even in secrecy, truth sometimes finds its own way home.
The Mothers’ Prison
Judith Sachs spent her final months of pregnancy inside the Louise Wise House for Unwed Mothers.
Behind its polite façade, young women were cut off from family and told their only moral option was surrender.
They sewed layettes for the babies they would never raise; every stitch was an unspoken goodbye.
When labor ended, the infants were taken to nurseries, and the mothers were told to rest and forget.
No one truly forgets.
The First Seven Months
Before Josh’s adoption was finalized, he spent seven months in foster care with a Black family in New York City.
They cared for him through his first smiles and first solid foods.
On the day he was handed to his new parents, the family’s young daughter carried him to his adoptive mother and said softly, “He loves grits.”
Josh’s new mother went straight to the store, searching for Gerber Grits that didn’t exist.
That story became a cherished memory—a bridge between two homes, two cultures, and one beloved baby.
Still, the placement raises questions.
Louise Wise Services publicly described itself as “the leading agency for Jewish adoptions, matching Jewish children with Jewish families.”
Yet in the 1960s, at the height of racial tension, a white Jewish infant was placed for months with a Black foster family.
The record offers no explanation.
Whatever the reason, that inconsistency reveals how little transparency families were given—even when lives were being shaped forever.
The Search Begins
When I married Josh, I married his mystery.
Once the birth certificate arrived, I became his researcher, historian, and detective.
Night after night I sat with open tabs, DNA databases, and scraps of hope.
Public accounts show that in the mid-20th century, Louise Wise Services worked with psychiatrist Dr. Peter Neubauer on nature-versus-nurture studies that separated siblings for observation.
The files remain sealed at Yale until 2065.
Neubauer once said, “We were able to learn a lot about the importance of parenting and of environmental factors.”
To me, those words sound chilling—people reduced to factors.
An old agency brochure boasted: “By careful selection we assure the successful integration of child and home.”
Integration, in their language, meant deciding whose story was worth keeping.
Finding His Father
The blank line on the certificate haunted us, but that single note—Italian, died in Vietnam—gave us direction.
I narrowed the search to Italian-American soldiers born around 1942 on the East Coast who died in Vietnam in 1966 or 1967.
I built family trees for each one on Ancestry.com and ran ThruLines to test DNA connections.
Only one name lit up the screen with a perfect match: Specialist 4th Class Anthony “Tony” DeRiggi.
Dozens of cousins, second and third generations, all pointed back to him.
The data didn’t whisper; it roared.
Tony DeRiggi—volunteer soldier, Italian son of New Jersey, killed by grenade in 1966 — was Josh’s father.
When I told Josh, he sat very still.
Then he nodded once and said, “I always knew he was out there.”
Later, DNA connections led us to Tony’s sister Dolores and her daughter Toni, named after her uncle.
Toni’s first email read, “He was my favorite uncle.”
For the first time, Josh saw his father’s face and heard stories of the man whose courage lives inside him.
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Finding Judith
Finding his mother was hard.
A DNA genealogist discovered that a Judith Sachs once shared an apartment with Judith Andres and her two children.
After months of checking records, it became clear that Judith Andres was Judith Sachs, living under her married name.
She had built a new life, carried her secret, and died in 2009.
Two half-siblings remain.
Through them, we glimpsed the quiet strength of the woman who had given Josh life and love enough to let him go.
Jeff’s Descent
While we pieced together the past, tragedy unfolded in the present.
Josh’s adoptive brother Jeff, also adopted through Louise Wise, had long battled untreated mental illness.
When Jeff was a baby, his earliest days were filled with uncertainty. He was shuttled between four different homes before finally being adopted. Even then, he would cry and cry—his little heart aching in ways no one could seem to soothe. Unlike Josh, who as a baby hardly ever cried, Jeff’s tears became a reflection of the deep sensitivity he carried all his life. That endless crying became a quiet prophecy of a lifetime spent feeling everything too deeply—of sadness that shaped him, and a yearning that never quite went away. Yet within that pain, he found peace in the language of music. Jeff was a true musical savant—he could pick up any instrument and play it as if he’d known it all his life. Through melody and sound, he found the solace that the world could not give him. For a time, Jeff was even a member of the 12 Tribes cult, though their ban on music was a hard pass for him. Yet, he yearned for a belonging that never came.
In 2024 their adoptive mother underwent knee-replacement surgery and returned home to recover.
Not long after, the replacement failed—snapping her femur—and she was rushed back to the hospital.
She spent two months there and another ten in rehabilitation learning to walk again.
Just a month after she was readmitted, her house burned when a neighbor’s housefire spread.
Jeff took charge of rebuilding and managing everything alone—insurance claims, contractors, and the entire reconstruction project.
He tried heroically, but the strain hollowed him.
When the new house was finally finished, their mother moved back in.
Exactly one week later, at 4 a.m., Jeff woke her abruptly, told her to get dressed, and drove her to the hospital.
He left her at the emergency room, telling the nurses to run every test, and said he’d be back by seven.
He never returned.
Jeff had gone home—and there, in the foyer of the rebuilt house, he ended his life.
His death shattered us.
Jeff had been loving, creative, and sensitive—a reminder that unspoken grief can become unbearable when there’s no place for it to go.
He deserved peace and the answers he never got.
Bloodlines and Reckoning
In the wake of loss we discovered something ancient:
Josh descends from King David through his birth mother, and I from the tribe of Levi through my dad—two lines that once built temples together.
It felt as if the universe itself were trying to mend what history had torn apart.
Louise Wise Services is gone, but its archives remain sealed—boxes of notes, photos, and decisions that chart thousands of lives.
When those records open in 2065, I will be there as Josh’s husband.
Not for revenge, but for truth.
Because history owes these children more than research data; it owes them their names.
It owes mothers like Judith the dignity of remembrance.
It owes brothers like Jeff the peace that transparency might have given them.
And it owes my husband the story he was born with—the one that should never have been taken away.
I am 24 years younger than Josh, who is currently 58 years old — in 2065, he would be 99 years old.
When those files finally see daylight, I’ll still be here.
I’ll be his witness, his advocate, his voice.
He will have his justice one day—
and I intend to make sure the world hears it.
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