The Adopted.com Namesearch feature was born out of a deep understanding of adoptees’ need to make the most out of the smallest pieces of information they possess about their birth family. Because too often, the quest for adoption reunion has little more to start on than a name, perhaps a place and a heart full of hope.
One of the most difficult aspects of being adopted is missing a part of your story. Being raised by your biological family can make it easy to take for granted the most basic pieces of your personal life puzzle: who your birth relatives are. But as an adoptee, you may only have a glaring, empty space where this part of you should have been.
And it’s not even a matter of deep considerations, such as your birth parents’ hopes and dreams, their moral compass or their relationship with the world around them. But it’s the simple, yet so meaningful questions that help you paint a vivid picture of them in your inner narrative: What are the names of the people who brought you into this world? When were they born? Where do they live? What colour are their eyes?... When you only have a few scattered details about the ones you are searching for, starting the journey to reconnect with your birth family can seem like an overwhelming task.
However, you will be happy to learn that, thanks to modern technology and an increasingly interconnected world, possessing even one fragment of identifying information about your birth parents, siblings or other relatives can be all you need to be reunited with them. This article will show you how easy it can be to search for a lost loved one with little more to go on than their name. Here is what you need to do:
1. Gather all the information available
If you feel like you don’t know the first thing about your family of origin, don’t despair - there is often more information out there than we think. Trying the following options is a good way to find out more about your biological relatives and increase your chances of finding your birth parents in a closed adoption:
Request your adoption records
If you were in an open adoption, in many states, all you need to do to access your parents’ identifying information (e.g. their names, birth date, last known address, etc.) may be to submit a request with the court of law of where your adoption took place. In some places, you may even be able to find your adoption records online, although not all states offer this possibility. These documents may also contain information about the circumstances of your adoption, so if you are able to access your adoption records, you may find answers to many of your questions.
Request your original birth certificate
Even if you are not able to obtain your adoption records, if you are legally an adult, most states will grant you a copy of your original birth certificate, should you request it. This document will contain your birth name and, depending on the state you are in, some identifying information about your parents. This may include their names and places of birth if this information was available at the time the certificate was issued.
Make a formal request for your birth parents’ non-identifying information
If you were in a closed adoption, you may still be able to obtain certain kinds of information about your birth parents which may not help you identify them directly, but can do so when correlated with other things you already know about them. Non-identifying information may include aspects such as your biological parents’ ethnicity, occupation, medical history or age at the time of your adoption. They may even reveal the reasons for adoption and when and where this event took place.
Talk to your adoptive relatives and family friends
You may have already tried to ask your adoptive parents about your biological relatives and they may not have been able or willing to provide all the information you need. However, talking to other relatives, such as older siblings, grandparents, aunts or uncles or even to close friends of the family may provide more details that you can piece together. They may remember things such as the first name or appearance of one of your biological parents, the name of the hospital you were born in or the agency that was used to facilitate your adoption. Any such aspects can be valuable when pieced together.
Overwhelmed by the search for your birth family? Adopted.com makes it easier to reconnect with loved ones. Register for free today to find your birth family.
2. Register to the world’s largest online adoption reunion registry
There are many benefits to using an adoption reunion registry to start the search for your biological relatives. That is because these platforms are extremely simple to use, can be accessed from the comfort of your own home and don’t require much information to provide you with likely matches. All you need to do is sign up and fill in a form with everything you know about your adoption and your birth parents and an algorithm will sort through the existing member profiles and find those who match the data you provided. Moreover, since all members sign up voluntarily, you can be sure that the people you have matched with are also searching for their lost biological relatives, such as yourself.
The effectiveness of this kind of platform depends on several things, such as its overall member pool and the proficiency of its search tools and algorithms. Adopted.com is the world’s largest international online adoption reunion registry, with a database of over 1.000.000 member profiles. And its varied search methods and advanced proprietary algorithm significantly increase your chances of becoming reunited with your birth family, even if you have minimal information to start your search with.
3. Discover the Adopted.com Namesearch feature
Registration is free on Adopted.com, so you don’t need to pay anything to create a profile and hope to be matched with your biological relatives. However, our premium members can enjoy a simple and highly effective search feature, called Namesearch. This tool is like an adoption reunion Google: it can be an immense help even if all you have is a fragment of information, such as the name or the date of birth of your lost family member. All you need to do is log in to your Adopted.com premium account and select “Search area” on our user-friendly, intuitive menu, then select the “Namesearch” option. You will be presented with 2 different search possibilities, allowing you to make the most of the information available to you and perhaps even find out more. Here is how each of the 2 options work and how you can use them to their fullest extent:
Search by name on Adopted.com
If you already know the name of the birth relative you are hoping to find, using this search tool will match it against the over 1.000.000 existing profiles in our database and take only a few moments to return those created under that name. Selecting the country of adoption can help significantly narrow down your results. And you can filter the matches further if you have other information available (e.g. date or place of birth).
However, if you don’t know the name of the biological family members you are looking for, but have other information about them, such as when or where they were born or when and where your adoption took place, you can also search using those parameters. If they are listed on your birth parents’ profile, you will still be matched with them.
Search by name within Historical records
If the previous search method has yielded no results or if you are simply curious about your more distant ancestors, you can always search by name within historical records. Our partner, the popular ancestry company My Heritage, offers their massive database of over 8 billion searchable historical records, newspapers, family tree profiles and photos.
You can enter the name and gender of the person you are looking for and even use other pieces of data, such as their date of birth, year range or a specific keyword (e.g. a location or an occupation) to narrow down your results. Using this tool can result in an abundance of information which can help you learn more about your biological family and generate new leads to help you reconnect with them. Moreover, it can help you identify relatives that you weren’t even aware you had.
4. Use other easy ways to search for your birth family on Adopted.com
Sometimes, you may find that regardless of the way you search, there are no records of the person you are looking for in either of the vast databases Namesearch uses. Perhaps your birth parents changed their names, or maybe they are very private people and did not disclose their personal information. There’s no need to worry because using Adopted.com, you still have an ace left in your hand. You can always use the one type of data that cannot be lost, falsified or mistaken: the one coded in your genes. Indeed, there is a way your DNA can help your adoption reunion search.
If you have ever had genetic testing performed by relevant companies such as My Heritage, AncestryDNA, MyTree or 23andMe, you can upload your DNA profile onto our platform. And if any of your birth relatives have also done the same, our algorithm will identify them regardless of the information provided on their profile and return a match. This is also a good way to discover extended family members you may be interested in connecting with.
5. Never give up hope
It can be deeply frustrating and discouraging to have so many modern tools at your disposal and still be unable to find your birth relatives. However, every new day brings another chance to receive a match. If the sought-after relative one day decides to create their own profile on Adopted.com and their information fits the data you provided, you will be instantly matched with them. And that is not unlikely to happen, since more and more people are registering to our platform every day. Similarly, running a new White Pages or Historical Records Namesearch every once in a while has a chance to one day yield the long-awaited result, as your lost relative may have just entered their databases.
Remember to make some room for magic in your life and allow yourself to hope that even if today wasn’t your day and your quest for your birth family still continues, there is no reason why tomorrow couldn’t start with the words “you have a match”. And while you are still on your journey to adoption reunion, you can always find comfort, support and shared experiences with the large and compassionate Adopted.com Community, who will be there for you every step of the way.
