Out-of-print today, with rare copies sometimes showing up on Ebay, The Great Adoptee Search Book was Strauss’s first book. It began when her reunion with her birth family was covered by People Magazine. Adoptees from across the country began to call, asking how to do a search. Describing how she’d found her birth relatives took hours, so she decided to commit a few pages to explaining the process. The few pages grew to almost a hundred, and so the little search book (with the big title) was born.

Her subsequent search and reunion book, Birthright, was born directly from The Great Adoptee Search Book. An agent in Boston saw the thin tome, and contacted Strauss about doing a proposal, which was eventually purchased by Penguin Books.

“One of the most amazing things about that first book,” Strauss recalls, “is when people would call me to let me know they’d read a few pages, tried a few of the suggestions, and found their birth family. One person had met their birthmother within four hours of buying my book. To think of having that kind of an impact on someone’s life was rather awesome.”

And the footprint on the cover? “My oldest son was one when he got to be in People Magazine because of the reunion. So my youngest son got to have his footprint on the cover of the book.”