Oct 15, 2025

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Embarking on an adoption reunion journey may be one of the most challenging decisions you ever make. There are so many reasons to do it and so many not to. You may experience an entire palette of emotions, from fear to excitement and from anger to curiosity. However, once you have finally set your heart to taking this great leap of faith and joining an online adoption reunion registry to search for your birth family, one emotion prevails over all others. And that is hope.

Here, at Adopted.com, we have spent the past 20 years developing the best ways to honour that hope and increase your chances of being reunited with the biological relatives you seek. Our commitment to your adoption journey means that when you entrust us with your search profile, we won’t settle for simply finding your one most likely match. We will provide you with all your partial matches as well, as time and experience have taught us that in almost every case, imperfect information has the potential to stand in the way of adoption reunion. This article will explain to you exactly why this approach is so effective, and why it may be the best option for you.

How does Profile Matching work on Adopted.com?

Since Adopted.com relies on voluntary adoption record profiles, all the information we use to match you with your birth family has been freely given. This makes it easier to find your birth parents even in a closed adoption. It is also a great approach because you can be certain that if the biological relative you seek is in our database, they have also been looking for you. We do know that not all adoption and birth information is complete or remembered correctly, so the first step in being matched with someone else is sharing all you know about the adoption with us, in a voluntary and secure manner.

1. You provide all the data that can help your search

The first thing you are asked to do as you register on Adopted.com is to fill in a short form. It contains 10 simple questions about:

• yourself (e.g. your relationship to the person you seek)
• the biological family member you are looking for (e.g. their date of birth)
• the adoption itself (e.g. the area where the adoption took place).
• anything else you may find relevant (a personal message written by you)

These items are designed specifically to make the most out of any information you have and to make it easier to match your profile against those of our other members. If you don’t know the answer to every question, there’s no need to worry. You can still find a match even with some missing information, as you are about to see.

2. Our algorithm returns a pool of potential matches

Once you have filled in your form and hit the search button, our proprietary algorithm quickly compares the data you have entered against all the member profiles in our database. Depending on the similarities it finds, it often returns a number of potential matches, each with a score that gives you an idea of how many common elements your profiles share.

For example, you may receive a strong, 9/10 match, meaning that the other person provided answers compatible with your own to 9/10 questions, and there is a good chance they may be the one you seek. But you might also receive several lower-scoring matches (e.g. 7/10 matches, even 6/10 matches, etc). In these cases, the respective members have answered fewer questions in a way that suggests they may be the birth relatives you are searching for, based on your own responses. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean you are not related. There could be other factors at play.

3. Our algorithm returns a pool of potential matches

Additional filters allow you to further customize your results in a way that is very specific to you. This is where you can review the specifics of every profile that is a possible match, to ensure that nothing gets past you when you are assessing the possibilities. This also allows you to message your specific profiles of interest (and tag them with your own score) so you can follow up on all possibilities. Since we have been collecting profiles for more than 20 years, your chances of finding someone in this group is substantial.

Why do we provide a wider pool of matches?

It can seem a bit confusing and counterintuitive to return several potential matches, some more likely to be related to you than others, than a single result. However, rest assured that we do this for very good reasons based on what we have learned over more than 2 decades, and it all has to do with increasing your chances of success.

Anyone involved in an adoption can have the wrong information

You may be very excited to see our platform return a 9/10 match, only to be hit with a cold wave of apprehension. Perhaps everything about your birth date, your place of adoption and other meaningful details line up perfectly, but you are a woman, and they seem to be searching for their son. Why would this even be considered a match?... This situation can happen with many pieces of vital information - certain details may be uncannily similar, while others may feel like a complete dead end. However, you will be relieved to learn that it is not uncommon for either adoptees, birth parents or other relatives seeking reunion, to provide the wrong information unknowingly. And it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not the one they are searching for.

For example, birth mothers who place their children up for adoption immediately after birth may not even get to see them before they are taken away. They may be (intentionally or accidentally) misinformed about the gender of their child, so they may think they are searching for a son when they are actually trying to find their daughter. If the birth father (or a different biological relative) is the one searching for the child, it is even easier to have the wrong facts. Since they were often not present when the child was born or adopted, they need to rely on information shared by others, which may be, for whatever reason, unreliable.

Even more frequently, birth parents’ memory may be playing tricks on them when it comes to aspects such as the child’s birth date or the name of the hospital they were born in, especially if the adoption happened several decades ago. Oftentimes, letting go of a child is a traumatic experience, which can interfere with the way memories are created and recalled.

Yet another situation that comes up is that a birth event can take place spanning more than 1 day, leading to involved parties considering the birth to have occurred on different days. Rest assured, we have accounted for that, and we provide results that are with a few days to make sure you don't overlook a match.

We know that adoptees themselves can often hold false beliefs about their own start in life. They may have asked their adoptive family about their origins and received incorrect information. In most cases, it is an honest mistake, a misrecollection or hearsay that got twisted around. Commonly, there can also be deliberate deception, as a way to “protect” certain parties by keeping them separated. Sometimes, it’s even the adoptee that pieces things together incorrectly from the few adoption records they could find (e.g. they may think they were adopted in the same state where they were born, but this may not be true, and in fact another country can also be involved in this more often than you might think!)

The bottom line is that while there may be discrepancies in responses between you and some of your matches, this does not automatically rule them out. Having a chance to have a look at match profiles and communicating with them for further details can often reveal that they were the one you had been looking for all along. The stories we can share are many! This includes people who found one another on our platform, believed that this approach was 'too easy to be right' and therefore overlooked that they had in fact found the family member they seek, discovering only later that they had missed an opportunity to connect on our site previously.

Many adoptees know little about their origins

Obtaining your closed adoption records can be almost impossible in many states. That is why many adoptees know next to nothing about the circumstances of their birth or the people who brought them into this world. This lack of information is, in fact, one of the most common roadblocks for adoptees in searching for their birth family - as many have no idea where they could even start. However, Adopted.com can offer them hope, even with little to go on. They can search for their match even if all they know is a gender, a name or a date, and leave most of the other questions unanswered.

This does not only apply to adoptees, but it can also apply to people trying to find siblings lost to adoption or even biological fathers searching for children they never knew they had. They may have one grain of precious information in a sea of “I don’t know”. Our system is designed specifially with this in mind.

The great thing about providing a pool of matches for your personal review is that one isolated kernel of truth that does not go to waste. It can be recognised by another party as highly relevant, and it can be the thread that unravels the mystery. For example, an adoptee can mention in their profile that they remember being adopted with a particular stuffed toy, and the birth parent can recognise the description, even if all else is blurry.

Wider match pools increase your chances of finding the right person

As we have shown above, people who are searching for their birth family can often have mistaken, incomplete or even precious little information to share about the adoption and the ones they seek. That alone would never result in an apparently perfect match. This means that they would never have a chance to be featured among your results in a system where only the highest-scoring match would be returned, even if they were indeed related to you. This is where our decades of experience really serves you!

Providing you with a pool of profiles that show some similarities to your own gives you a chance to see for yourself if any of them provide a lead worth pursuing. In the worst-case scenario, you find them irrelevant and only take your best match into account. However, in the best-case scenario, you may notice some detail that invites further exploration and perhaps leads to a fortunate reunion.

Only providing perfect matches excludes other birth family members

When searching for their birth parents, many adoptees are not even aware that they may have other birth relatives trying to find them. Their biological siblings, aunts or uncles, or even grandparents may be using our platform, hoping to one day be reunited. However, when filling in the form, the adoptee will specify that they are searching for their birth parents, while their other birth relatives would report searching for their sibling, nephew/niece or grandchild. This already constitutes a less-than-perfect match. If they don’t know other information, such as the year of the adoption, the score will drop even lower. In fact, the very month we launched our service in 2005, we had exactly this kind of match (our first match!) for a woman who was seeking her birth parents and found in fact 4 blood siblings, and subsequently a very large family who were seeking a reunion with her!

If our algorithm only returns a 10/10 match, which has a good chance of being your birth parent, you may easily miss these other birth family members who would be happy to have you in their lives. While you may not even know they are out there, they may have been looking for you for years. So a wider pool of matches gives you a chance to find each other.

Does a high-scoring match mean I have found my birth family?

A 10/10 (or even a 9/10 match) can be considered a strong match. That means there is a good chance that the member who owns the respective profile is the birth relative you have been searching for. However, there are, sadly, no guarantees of that. Coincidences can happen, as children born on the same date, at the same hospital, can be adopted in the same year, in the same state. A strong profile match is a great starting point, but you will still need to take some additional steps to ensure that you are truly related. Remember that it is also fairly common for members to have found their birth relatives among the lower-scoring matches rather than the highest-scoring ones - again due to misinformation on one side of the search.

What can I do to get stronger matches?

Unfortunately, there isn’t very much you can do to increase the strength of your matches. If the person you are looking for is a member and both of you were able to answer the 10 questions on the registration form in an accurate and complete fashion, you will get a high-scoring match. Otherwise, the score may be lower in a match level that you wil have to review manually.

We encourage you to make sure you add every relevant bit of information you have into your profile. You can double-check the answers to all the questions to make sure they are correct, to the best of your knowledge. Moreover, your profile allows you to enter a personal message in free form - you can use that opportunity to share any details about the adoption or the person you seek that you can remember. While it may not always help you get a better match, it can really help the other person recognise you even if you are in the pool of weaker matches.

What if I cannot find my match?

It can be sad and disheartening to hit the search button with the highest hopes, only to be returned no matches. And it can feel even more heartbreaking to get several matches, perhaps even some strong ones, only to realise they were not your birth family after all. It’s normal to be left with a lump in your throat and a weight on your chest if you can’t find your biological family immediately. Please don’t let that discourage you or feel like you have failed in your search.

We know that it took immense strength and courage to start off on your quest to become reunited with your birth family and this journey should be celebrated. Additionally, oftentimes, it is just a matter of time before the elusive match is found. Adopted.com is the world’s largest online adoption reunion registry, with millions of members, growing larger every day. Thousands of new profiles are being created every month, and any of those people could be the one you are searching for. When that happens, you won’t need to search again; you will be automatically matched.

In the meantime, our caring and supportive Adopted Community is always here for you to share your story, your joy and your pain. People from all over the world, connected by the invisible silver thread of shared hopes, fears and heartaches, are here to keep you grounded, make you feel seen and understood and remind you that tomorrow is a brand new day and all your dreams and wishes can still come true.