Tracing Adoptive Parents

Tracing adoptive parents is a difficult task to undertake on your own, there is so much to consider such as who to use to carry out the search for you and when to begin your search, through to emotional considerations such as the reaction of your adoptive parent, how you will feel when you talk to them, how will you act, what will you say? This can be an emotional rollercoaster and with no guarantees at the end of it, one that you must steel yourself for any eventuality.


Here we will outline things that you can do you to trace adoptive parents and we’ll discuss some of the considerations that it will be wise to cover before you embark on your search.

Adoption became legal in 1926 but it was not until the mid seventies that adopted adults were given the right to obtain their original birth certificate, this gave adults looking at tracing adoptive parents the chance to find out more about their birth family. This means that you can now find out the key information you need to start tracing your adoptive parents.

It’s very common for people who were adopted to want to trace their adoptive parents; people naturally want to know who they are, where they came from and such as family medical history. You can soon see why you are not alone in your wish to trace your adoptive parents. If you were not adopted but are looking for your birth parents please read this blog post called how to trace your birth parents.

This will be an emotional time for you, chances are that once you were adopted you were raised by a loving family, they may or may not know about your quest at tracing adoptive parents, they may not approve if they do but this is a personal decision that every single person who was adopted at least considers to do. Just because you trace them doesn’t mean you are looking for them to act like parents, you already have parents what you are searching for is your biological mother or father.

Once you have considered the emotion journey you need to look at what you can actually do to trace your birth parents. The first step is to pick an organisation to trace them for you. There are many to choose from and prices can fluctuate massively.

Our service is based around tracing people using public information, so we’ll perform a search for you and use various data sources to do so. Don’t worry if you do not have much information as we can use our systems to fill in the blanks and then move, tracing the exact person to their current address. We can also help you make first contact with them too.

The key information we need to begin a search for you centre around what you know and can remember, basic things like a full name and an area of the country are a great place to start, then adding an age or a date of birth mean that we can move investigations on quickly and cost effectively. We can access lots of data as we are regulated by the credit services association, this means that we can access the most accurate and up to date information available on the location of any people in the UK including birth parents.

If you place an order with ourselves you will not only access this level of information you will also be accessing our expert team of researchers, our researchers are highly trained and are experts at locating people, as well as the public they work for solicitors, councils and a host of businesses to locate people for a wide variety of reasons.

So if you are looking at tracing adoptive parents then you are in the right place.

Doing the work yourself can be possible but it is hard to gage what your success will be, major draw backs will come from cost as you will be charged for your searches per record, time will also be a massive factor, so if you are busy and want a fast cost effective solution to tracing an adoptive parent then you might be better served using a company like ours to trace them.

If you are determined to trace them yourself then there are things that you can do, the difficult part you will have is confirming that you have the correct person and not just someone with the same name. We have some great ways of confirming that we have the correct person but the systems we use to do this are not available online to the public. You can of course search old records such as marriage records, this can be useful if you are looking for your birth mother as she could of course changed her name more than once since the adoption. You can also check death records which, although not very pleasant for you should be one of the first things you do. If you do find some possible matches, then you will need to use the electoral roll to find potential addresses. This can be a problem as the electoral roll has been edited since 2003 and now contains only half of UK adults. If you do find a potential match at an address the only way you will be able to confirm the information is via direct contact, this could be difficult if you have to phone the person up. You could call them and find that it’s the wrong person; this would be such a disappointment after you worked yourself up to the call in the first place. If it is the correct person but they don’t answer the phone it’s probably not fair to say “hey can I speak to your wife please I think she gave me up for adoption in 1972” this might get you off on the wrong foot!

So yes you can be involved in tracing your adoptive parents but it would probably be best done by assisting a professional researcher in doing so by supplying the correct information and being there to answer any questions that the researcher may have over the course of any investigation.

If you have any questions about our searches to trace adoptive parents then you can speak to one of our highly trained researchers on 0113 2825900 and they will be happy to help you with your search.

Good luck with tracing adoptive parents

The Best Thing Was To Leave It To The Professionals
Tracing Adoptive Parents FinderMonkey

"I wasn’t convinced in my own ability what I was doing so then I knew that the best thing to do was to leave it to the professionals. It wasn’t just another job to them, they were on my side and it really was full of compassion."

- Kevin Risebrow