UpFront with NGS: adoption

Showing posts with label adoption. Show all posts

12 September 2016

MO Adoptees born before 1941 can NOW access original birth certificates

MO Adoptees born before 1941 can NOW access original birth certificates

Effective late last month, Missouri adoptees born before 1 January 1941 can get a copy of their original birth certificate -- Birth certificates now unlock past for some Missouri adoptees.

JEFFERSON CITY • Almost at the start of business hours Monday, eight people waited in a conference room at the state records office for something that had been out of their grasp for decades: their original birth certificates.

They paid $15, filled out yellow forms and waited intently for state workers to retrieve the documents from a storage facility 10 miles away. Their requests would take about two hours to process, but most agreed that wasn’t long compared to nearly a lifetime of waiting...

The article also reports that even less restrictive laws will apply starting in 2018 …

On Jan. 2, 2018, adoptees born after 1940 and who are at least 18 years old will be able to request their original birth certificates. For this group, the law will have some limits. Birth parents who want to remain anonymous may file a document with the state that would effectively redact their names from the original birth certificate. If both birth parents file the same document, the original birth certificate will remain sealed.

Exciting news for Missouri Adoptees.

Not sure if records are “open” for the state where your family member was adopted, check out “Access to Adoption Records” (current through June 2015 and so the change in MO law is not included).

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05 February 2016

Colorado Adoptees Can Now Access Birth Records

The most recent state to allow its adoptees access to adoption records is Colorado.

As of Jan. 1, 2016, all birth certificates regardless of when the adoption took place are available.

Forms, including “Application to Access an Original Birth Certificate” can be found here.

You can see a summary of the applicable law (SB 51) here. The law was passed in 2014 and created a transition period until 1 January 2016.

The American Adoption Congress maintains a page which identifies which states provide access and then currently relevant legislation for every state.

Upfront with NGS has discussed how other states have recently opened birth records for adoptees, For the first time, Rhode Island opens adoption records (2012) and Ohio opens adoption records for Jan 1964 - Sep 1996 this Friday (20 March 2015).

Is your state on the verge of allowing adoptees access to their original birth records?

Are you an adoptee who has recently gotten access to your birth certificate? What did that mean to you?

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NGS does not imply endorsement of any outside advertiser or other vendors appearing in this blog. Any opinions expressed by guest authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of NGS.

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Unless indicated otherwise or clearly an NGS Public Relations piece, Upfront with NGS posts are written by Diane L Richard, editor, Upfront with NGS.

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19 March 2015

Ohio opens adoption records for Jan 1964 - Sep 1996 this Friday (20 March 2015)

It was great to see the headline Ohio set to open adoption records sealed for 50 years. As we continue to read about threats to records access, it’s nice to read about increased access.

Birth certificates and court decrees — some sealed as long as 51 years — will become available to adoptees or their direct descendants for the first time without a court order. It remains to be seen, however, whether the papers that many adoptees have longed to hold in their hands will contain the information they want.

For the last year, the birth parents of those who were adopted between January 1964 and September 1996 have had the option of having their names redacted from the records. The window to do that will close forever on Thursday.

Birth parents who chose to maintain the anonymity that the 1963 law promised them were required instead to submit lengthy medical and social histories for the files.

Do read the full article for more details on the law and some of those looking forward to gaining access to their records. You might also read Impact of New Law on Adoptions Finalized Between January 1, 1964 – September 18, 1996 from the Ohio Department of Health.

Starting March 20, 2015, adult adoptees adopted in the relevant years may submit an application to ODH for a copy of their adoption file. The requesting adoptee must be at least 18 years old. The adult lineal descendants (lineal descendants are described as children and grandchildren of the adoptee) of the adoptee may also submit an application for a copy of the adoption file. An adoption file usually contains the original birth certificate and a court order decree of the adoption. It may also include biological parent release forms and/or biological sibling release forms that were submitted to ODH before March 20, 2014 and any of the contents located in the current "Birth Parent Information Packet".

A video has been produced to explain how an adopted person adopted between the date range provided above.

I valued reading about the process where birth parents could opt to have their names redacted though had to submit lengthy medical histories. A way to achieve a balance between the needs of those put up for adoption and the birth parents, some of which may want to remain anonymous.

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NGS does not imply endorsement of any outside advertiser or other vendors appearing in this blog. Any opinions expressed by guest authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of NGS.

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Unless indicated otherwise or clearly an NGS Public Relations piece, Upfront with NGS posts are written by Diane L Richard, editor, Upfront with NGS.

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01 March 2015

Long Lost Family -- One-Hour TV Special TONIGHT on TLC

The press release says ...

TLC REUNITES LOVED ONES ON NEW SPECIAL LONG LOST FAMILY

Hoping to find their biological families, two adoptees team up with hosts Chris Jacobs and Lisa Joyner to embark on an emotional journey in the new one-hour special LONG LOST FAMILY. For hosts Chris and Lisa, the painstaking search for answers is familiar territory. Both of them were adopted as young children, later searching for – and ultimately reuniting with – their biological families. Premiering Sunday, March 1 at 10/9c on TLC, viewers will watch adoptees go through the ups and downs of trying to track down loved ones they’re so anxious to meet....

Read the full press release for more details.

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NGS does not imply endorsement of any outside advertiser or other vendors appearing in this blog. Any opinions expressed by guest authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of NGS.

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Unless indicated otherwise or clearly an NGS Public Relations piece, Upfront with NGS posts are written by Diane L Richard, editor, Upfront with NGS.

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22 October 2014

(UK News) Relatives of adopted adults now able to trace family tree

This is great news from the

. Whether adoptees or those who gave children up for adoption want to reach out and connect, health information about an adoptee’s birth family has long been desired by adopted individuals. They may want to know whether they have inherited a genetic tendency towards particular health issues and conditions.

Children, grandchildren and other relatives of adopted adults can now trace back through their ancestors’ lives - helping them to unearth their family history, discover more about their medical background and reach out to long-lost relatives under new rules introduced today [24 September 2014]...

For example, those who have lost a parent to cancer or a heart problem will be able to discover whether their grandparents or other birth relatives suffered from the same condition, giving them the chance to seek advice and support.

These rules will come into force by November 2014. Read more here.

This 2012 document gives you a sense of US Access to Adoption Records – who can access and under what circumstances. If you know of a more updated version, please post a comment.

This got me curious about whether any US Archives have adoption records that are publicly available?!?! I learned that Utah law permits public access to adoption records over 100 years old. It also appears that in Oregon, the Oregon Laws published biennially, included reports of adoptions from 1864 through 1919 when the law was repealed.

Does your state archive provide easy access to historic adoption records?

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NGS does not imply endorsement of any outside advertiser or other vendors appearing in this blog. Any opinions expressed by guest authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of NGS.

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Think your friends, colleagues, or fellow genealogy researchers would find this blog post interesting? If so, please let them know that anyone can read past UpFront with NGS posts or subscribe!

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Suggestions for topics for future UpFront with NGS posts are always welcome. Please send any suggested topics to UpfrontNGS@mosaicrpm.com

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Unless indicated otherwise or clearly an NGS Public Relations piece, Upfront with NGS posts are written by Diane L Richard, editor, Upfront with NGS.

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25 July 2014

Upfront Mini Bytes – Adoption, Chicago, Tribal Maps, Odd French Linguistics, Surname Distribution, Tips for Reading Old Handwriting, Historic Photos, and Digitized Australian Newspapers

Editor’s Note: After a brief moratorium, Upfront Mini Bytes are back!

Welcome to our newest edition of our periodic feature Upfront Mini Bytes. In Upfront Mini Bytes we provide eight tasty bits of genealogy news that will help give you a deeper byte into your family history research. Each item is short and sweet. We encourage you to check out the links to articles, blog posts, resources, and anything genealogical!

We hope you found the past editions helpful. Use your favorite search engine with “Upfront with NGS” “Mini Bytes” or use this Google search link.

Do you have questions, suggestions for future posts, or comments? Please post a comment or send an e-mail to UpFront@ngsgenealogy.org.

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The Adoption History Project has a neat online archive. Many in our family history community are adopted or are researching adoptions involving ancestors. It has subsections labeled: Timeline, People & Organizations, Adoption Studies/Science, Topics in Adoption History, Further Reading, and Document Archives. There is a lot of helpful material here, especially when you are seeking historical context.

Have roots or connections to Chicago? Checkout This Clever Map Compares Chicago Before and After the Great Fire. You can overlay two maps: “One, culled from Google Maps’ API, shows Chicago of (roughly) today. The other is a color map of the city drawn in 1868, three years before the Great Fire.”

2010 Census - Tribal Tract Reference Maps are available from the US Census Bureau. These give you a very detailed perspective on tribal census tracts and tribal block groups as delineated to support 2010 Census data dissemination. The maps also show the boundaries and names of American Indian reservations, off-reservation trust lands (ORTLs), Alaska Native areas, Hawaiian home lands, states, counties, county subdivisions, places, and much more. A great resource to match against historic maps and visualize how reservations have changed through time.

If you are doing French genealogy, be aware of some Linguistic Oddities. “Beyond the study of name-mangling in parish and civil registrations is the issue of odd terminology ... Reading civil and parish registrations is repetitious work and just as we begin to doze off, invariably, an odd term will snap us awake, even make us laugh. But these terms can be baffling as well, so today we give a mini-lexicon.”

Appreciating where surnames might be found can often help us advance our genealogy research. One tool that might help you is PublicProfiler Worldnames. At this site, you enter your surname (or the one that interests you) and run a search to determine the world-wide distribution of the name. Do know that you need to enter an email address and indicate gender to get started. The coverage is North American, Europe, the UK, India, China, Australia, New Zealand, and Argentina. The map shown is for Barna which fits my ancestor’s migration from Galicia (Poland near the borders with the Ukraine and Slovakia (previously Kingdom of Hungary).

Though not “new” definitely important to our research: Tips for reading old handwriting, Tips for Reading Old Records: Handwriting, Spelling, and Boundaries, and Deciphering Old Handwriting. If you want to test yourself on Early American Handwriting, play this “game” to decode the messages of handwritten documents. How did you do?

A fun visual bit of history, 14 Amateur Photos Taken With the Very First Consumer Camera. “Introduced in 1888, the Kodak No. 1 was the first camera marketed to average consumers. And thanks to a new set of images from the National Media Museum, we can now see what kinds of photos these early amateurs shot.”

Trove is a wonderful collection of digitized Australian newspapers. It includes National, Regional, and State newspapers. As of earlier this week there were 13,683,606 pages consisting of 131,943,198 articles available to search, covering from 1803 to 2007. Learn more about the Australian Newspaper Digitsation Program.

Editor’s Note: Thanks to everyone that responded to the Upfront Mini Bytes survey. Based on your feedback, this feature will continue with the same format and frequency.

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NGS does not imply endorsement of any outside advertiser or other vendors appearing in this blog. Any opinions expressed by guest authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of NGS.

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Think your friends, colleagues, or fellow genealogy researchers would find this blog post interesting? If so, please let them know that anyone can read past UpFront with NGS posts or subscribe!

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Suggestions for topics for future UpFront with NGS posts are always welcome. Please send any suggested topics to UpfrontNGS@mosaicrpm.com

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Unless indicated otherwise or clearly an NGS Public Relations piece, Upfront with NGS posts are written by Diane L Richard, editor, Upfront with NGS.

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27 November 2013

November is National Adoption Month

Though the month is almost over, we are still celebrating National Adoption Month.

Learning about adopted ancestors, trying to identify the biological parents of those adopted and other challenges sometimes await those delving into the adoption stories of our family trees. Here are some resources to help:

Finding Adopted Ancestors (Michael J Leclerc, Mocavo)
RootsWeb's Guide to Tracing Family Trees – Adoptions and Orphans Research
Adoption records and genealogy (Debbie Mieszala, FindMyPast)
How to Handle Adoption in the Family Tree (Kimberly Powell, About.com)

Have you successfully researched an adopted ancestor? Share your story! Tell us what was most helpful to your research success.

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30 July 2013

Truth can be stranger than fiction! Family learns adopted daughter is a true part of family tree ...

The more I do genealogy research, the more I am convinced that the truth is often “stranger than fiction!”

I don’t think any of us are creative enough to have thought of some of the “lives” that we have documented. So, though we may go with the “law of averages” as we do our research, we do need to keep in mind that people were not “average” and that many lived amazing and “strange lives!”

Last winter I read about just such an instance of this, Family learns adopted daughter is a true part of family tree.

“It wasn’t until 1940 United States Census data was released that a relative started doing some research and discovered that Sarah is Steve’s fourth cousin once removed. That means Sarah’s brothers and sisters in the Hamilton family are her fifth cousins.”

This was a girl who was born in TX, lived in KS (where she was adopted) and the family moved to SD. So, we are not talking about a small community where one is less surprised to find that the neighbors are distantly or closely related.

Have you had “truth stranger than fiction” elements in your own family history?

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27 February 2013

Proposed New York Legislation Will Allow Access to Adoptees' Birth Records

source: http://img.ehowcdn.com/article-new/ehow/images/a01/t3/av/copy-birth-certificate-800x800.jpg

Most of us are familiar with how difficult it can be to get any vital record, never mind when you are an adoptee and seek your original birth certificate.

According to an e-mail sent out by the German Genealogy Group on Long Island (and published by Dick Eastman),

The Adoptee Bill(s) of Rights would repeal the 1935 legislation that sealed in perpetuity the original birth certificates, and thus the original identities, of anyone adopted in the state of New York.

The Bill permits an adopted adult to access birth certificates and medical histories when they reach the age of 18. It also creates a contact preference to be filed by the birth parents...

Do read the full post and learn what you can do to help this measure pass! As with many efforts to increase vital records access the voice of the genealogical and family history community need to be heard.

Though it’s nice to report on news where access to vital records might be expanded, unfortunately, most of the recent news has been about continued efforts to limit access to the Death Master File et al. Do periodically check the website for the Records Preservation and Access Committee to keep abreast of threats to records access.

Do you know of another state where vital records access might be expanded?

Editor's Note: There was also a recent post about OH and a proposed bill to open birth certificates to adoptees.

Editor's Note: I came across this interesting article -- Adoptee Rights & Access to Their Original Birth Certificates. It brings up a number of interesting points. One which jumped out at me is that until an adoption is finalized, many of the "original" birth certificates were publicly available at the local county clerk's office. Only "after" an adoption did they become sealed or amended. This would be true in a state like NC, where I live, and non-certified copies of vital records are pretty much public record as soon as they are recorded.

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18 July 2012

For the first time, Rhode Island opens adoption records

Rhode Island is making adoption records available for the first time to adults 25 years or older.

A state law adopted in September, 2011 has recently taken effect, and on Monday [2 July 2012], Governor Lincoln Chafee ceremoniously handed birth records to four adoptees, as dozens more looked on at an auditorium at the Rhode Island Department of Health.

31 January 2012

Adoptee Requests for IL Birth Certificates Exceeds 4000 in First Month

Example of an IL Birth Certificate -- My Husband's Maternal Grandmother

In an age when much of the news is about limiting our access to vital records, IL in November of last year made it so that adoptees age 21 and older and born after Jan. 1, 1946, can get access to their original birth certificates as long as their birth parents have not filed a form to prevent the information from being released.

Read the articles “4,000 adoptees seek Ill. birth certificates” and “Hundreds of IL adoptees born before 1946 get birth certificate for first time” to learn more about the IL law and it’s significance to those impacted.

Do you know someone who has taken advantage of this change in the IL law?

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