What adoption records are online?
Which adoption records are available for free?
You may have very little information to begin with. Perhaps you are an adoptee yourself, or maybe one or both of your parents were adopted. Great care and caution is always needed when embarking on a search involving familial adoption. In general, the more adoptions that take place within the family, the more sensitive it is, and the more complex the ramifications.
Adoption orders themselves showing the change of name are highly confidential. Some people may already have their own copies of their adoption orders that they’ve kept within the family. Or they may have applied through the local authority to obtain a copy of their full adoption file, which would typically include this adoption order showing the name change.
If you’re an adoptee, you can always obtain a copy of your adoption certificate. The information on the adoption certificate itself is rather limited. It principally gives date of birth, place of adoption and name and address of the couple or single person that is adopting the child.
If you would like to find a copy of the original birth record for yourself or your parents then there are several steps open to you.
The birth indexes are available online.
• If you already know the original birth name you can search on a website such as FreeBMD. This is a list of all Births in England and Wales from 1837 until modern times.
• If you do not know the original birth name there may still be some clues to find your original identity or the original identity of your family member, either from family recollection (if appropriate) or from a study of the DNA.
The adoption indexes are not held online. They are held in key regional libraries around the UK. A search of these indexes can be carried out by adopted name, and there’s very few additional details given in the index.
Once you’ve looked at the indexes you can obtain a copy of the actual certificate for a few pounds. With the adopted name you can order the adoption certificate. With the birth name you can order the birth certificate. Neither document cross-references to the other one.
Many people have been able to use DNA to help identify or confirm their families at birth.
Adoption is always sensitive. Sometimes contact is retained between the adoptive family and the birth family, especially if adoption took place within the family. And sometimes a child’s name is not changed, especially when the adoption occurred within the family. We do not specialise in helping people search for adopted-out family members although there is a demand for this. We do, however, help many adoptees find out details of both their parents and indeed grandparents.
Local authorities may be able to provide information.
Where appropriate, DNA can certainly fill in the gaps.
Using DNA
We have worked with families where the person searching was adopted and one or both of their birth parents, were also adopted.
Once you’ve established through DNA the details of the main family groups, it will be possible though not straight-forward, to assign these groups to each of the four grandparents. Where both parents were adopted, we would focus on learning which surname the mother’s mother would have held. And thus work out the mother’s identity at birth.
We would hope to locate an entry of birth, from the freely available online indexes, that would lead to the original birth certificate of the person’s parent or grandparent.
Finding the birth father when he is not named in the adoption paperwork
We offer a complete service for this. We will invite you to take a DNA test with Ancestry and then we will analyse your results. Providing your biological father was British, American, Irish, Canadian, New Zealander, Australian and possibly South African, we should be able to identify him – and we have a very high success rate. If he was African, Chinese, Jamaican, Indian or from mainland Europe (Spain, Italy, Germany etc) it will be much more difficult, but we will advise that once we have seen your results.
There is another blog that explains more about this here
Making contact with adoptive family members
Contacts made where there’s been separation through adoption should be by a specialist post adoption intermediary. New family members may or may not be aware of the existence of the adoptee. It can be very distressing to discover that the written family history is not exactly as it was painted. It’s also equally important to protect all three members of the adoption triad. For this reason in the UK there’s a very good system where people can find out more and engage the services and adoption intermediary. We can signpost people to those services, we work with several very experienced people.