When she was pregnant with her first child, adoptee Christine Beaulieu of Hooksett decided she wanted to search for her birth mother. When she discovered she would have to pay an adoption agency $400 to begin the process, she changed her mind. There was no guarantee she would find her mother or that her mother would talk to her if she did.

"Losing financially and emotionally would have been difficult for me," she said.

That was in 1991. On Jan. 27, Beaulieu spoke with her birth mother for the first time. Thanks to long-time family friend Larry Maurice, locating her family cost little more than a long-distance phone call and 14 years of patience. For that, Beaulieu calls Maurice her hero.

By night, Maurice, who lives in Hillsboro, makes streetlamp bulbs for Osram Sylvania in Manchester. By day, he helps adoptees identify and locate their birth parents and vice versa. Beaulieu's is one of 170 cases Maurice takes credit for solving in the 12 years he's been doing this work. He spends dozens of hours on each case, and he does it for free.

Maurice has accrued hundreds of clients over the years, through word of mouth and adoption registry Web sites. And since the state unsealed adoptees' birth certificates on Jan. 1, his e-mail and cell phone have been flooded with requests for help from new clients and old ones whose cases previously had been unsolvable.

Maurice is not an adoptee himself. He never put a child up for adoption, and his two kids are biologically his own. He never had a personal connection to the cause -not until a stranger from Florida contacted him in 1993 and asked for a favor.

Maurice is the unofficial keeper of alumni records for Central High School in Manchester, his alma mater. The woman who contacted him thought her birth mother had attended Central and asked Maurice to compare her photograph to the school yearbooks, looking for a family likeness.

The yearbooks yielded no answers, but Maurice got hooked on the mystery.

"Tell Larry Maurice that you can't do something and he tries to prove you wrong," he said.

Working for free

From that point on, doing adoption searches became his hobby. Even when it became a full-time gig, Maurice said, he could never bring himself to ask people for money.

Maurice's father was a dowser, someone who can find groundwater with a divining stick, he said. He never charged for his services because, he said, people need water and God had given him the power to find it. Maurice said the same theory applies to his own work.

Karen Amos, who runs the Circle of Hope search agency in Somersworth and was working with the Florida woman when she contacted Maurice, said she was desperate by the time she turned to the yearbooks. But Maurice became invested in the search and has stayed committed to helping adoptees since then.

"You can't ask for a better guy, more conscientious, more caring, and a damn good searcher," Amos said.

After months of a frustrating search, Maurice and Amos helped the woman find her mother. A few years later, Maurice attended her wedding. So did her birth mother.

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