- Before you start your search
If you are looking for your birth mother, birth father or birth relatives, here are some things you should think about, including how intensely emotional it will be.
- Making contact: things to consider
Information about how to make contact, what might happen after contact is made, planning for the first meeting and having ongoing contact.
- Adoptions before 2010: applying if you're under 18
How to find information about past adoptions that occurred before 2010, for people with direct entitlement and are under age 18.
- Adoptions before 2010: applying if you're 18 or over
How to find information about past adoptions that occurred before 2010, for people with and without direct entitlement, and are age 18 or older.
- Adoptions after 2010
For adoptions that occurred after 2010, adopted people, adoptive and birth parents, and siblings of an adopted person can now gain information about each other from the day the adoption order is made.
- Reunion and Information Register (RIR)
Find out more about the Reunion and Information Register – formerly the Adopted Person's Contact Register – which helps people separated by adoption make contact with each other.
- Access to adoption information for birth fathers
How birth fathers can access their child's adoption information, including what to do if your name is not on the child's original birth certificate.
- Social and medical information
How to request access to social and medical information that was provided at the time of an adoption.
- Inheriting a deceased person’s right to adoption information
If an adopted person or birth parent dies, a relative can apply to ‘inherit’ the deceased person’s rights to adoption information.
- Advance Notice Register
For adoptions made before 2010, birth or adoptive parents and adopted people can apply to delay the release of identifying information, giving them time to prepare for possible contact.
- Contact Veto Register
The Contact Veto Register enables a birth parent or an adopted person to prevent another party to the adoption from making contact with them. A Contact Veto can only be requested if the adoption order was made before 26 October 1990.