My sense of white identity had been shattered. My mother's visit to my home in Illinois seemed like the right moment. This was not a conversation I wanted to have on the phone. The author’s mother, ...

Tracy Clark-Flory, a writer, on meeting her long-lost sister and how her mother’s life was shaped by being sent away to a “home for unwed mothers” in the 1960s. Credit...Illustration by Brian Rea ...