Search for Birth Parents in Adoption Tracing: Methodology

The papers which come with adopted children have usually been fairly accurate, though often missing a lot of details, and in many cases have been proven inaccurate.

If there are any names to go by, then the standard operating procedure is to do records searches and find the individuals that way first. Only if that doesn't work, such as if we do not have a complete name or identity and must rely on address or any other lead, do we pursue other methods, generally. (Only in exceptional cases may we do otherwise.) This is because people may move thereby wasting money on a trip, addresses in the documentation are sometimes inaccurate, and we can often find additional information in records searches which tells us more things about the person which are relevant to preparing for a possible visit.

Commonly, we have only the mother's name, but when a lady subsequently marries then her surname changes, the search becomes difficult because most records do not retain a lady's maiden name after it changes, in the Thai system. (This is unlike record keeping in many western countries.) We must search a wider variety of records in order to look for records of a lady by her obsolete maiden name, but we usually do find her this way.

Fathers are much easier to search for. However, we usually try to find and talk with the biological mother first.

If we go by another lead such as an address, clinic, or region, and if the lead is not specific enough, then we must be very careful as peoples' memories and beliefs can be as unreliable as witness testimony, often even worse. Usually, it is not that they are trying to trick us. For example, there are often multiple children placed into adoption from the same region, both formally and informally, and we could be led to the mother they know, not the mother related to you. They may have errors in their memory going way back. They may confuse imagination with memory. (People who have professionally studied witness testimony and how human memory works can tell you a lot of stories about that.)

We have also seen the idea of adoption take off. When a poor region or some social community learns about the option of putting a child in an orphanage, where they are adopted by a foreign family, it has sometimes resulted in multiple children from being put there, a "solution" for desperately poor people stretched past their limits or abandoned pregnant mothers. We would rather not do anything to encourage that.

It has also occurred that people see a foreigner and a means of getting monetary support, but this is actually rare ... but occasionally does happen, so we are careful in our approach so that we don't get false biological parents. You can always confirm things by a DNA test on your own.

In any case, we do not go forward to people with all the information. We reserve some information for confirmation. For example, if we are looking for the biological mother, we do not tell them the name of the father. If we find a lady, we ask for the name of the father. If we don't have the name of the father, then we ask for some other detail such as clinic name where the child was born, its location, a date of birth, or anything else we can for confirmation.

If there is any doubt about a biological parent, then you can always do a DNA test which will clearly confirm (99.9...%) or eliminate (0.00...%) a possible biological relationship. We can get a DNA sample from the alleged biological parent(s) if they are cooperative and mail this to you. On your end, you take your own DNA sample, and then send it to your own choice of DNA laboratory. It is just a painless wipe of the inside of the cheek. We have detailed instructions on how to do this.

There are many different kinds of cases, but the examples below illustrates some issues. Most cases are fairly straightforward whereby we find the biological parent(s) in our usual systematic way. Some cases require a little bit more running around following leads. However, there are sometimes exceptional cases.

A fairly common kind of case is where a baby was reported abandoned with no parental names associated with them. For example, they were found in a room at a commercial property, or out in a rice field somewhere, or at a construction site, etc., and we are given only a province name, or the name of a large district. You may think that is hopeless ... but it may not be, especially if the baby was found in good condition.

The reason is that many poor people of low education and menial labor jobs, when they cannot take care of a child, don't know what to do and are fearful of dealing with officials. They may even be illegal immigrants to Thailand, e.g., from Myanmar, Cambodia, or Laos. They may conspire with others to put together a cover story about a baby being found abandoned, parents unknown, and have a Thai person report the discovery.

When the government officials do their standard investigation, you can be pretty sure that the result will be that the parents are not known and the child is therefore put into the orphanage. Putting the child into the care of the Thai state and gaining Thai citizenship by default may be the goal.

However, when some friendly ladies come back there years later, with a photo of the child together with a foreign family, and emphasizing that we are not government officials but are just ordinary people helping the child and foreign adoptive parents, and able to keep a secret, we may be a very different response.

When a child is abandoned, a police report is required in the local jurisdiction, which in turn goes into the chronological record. Based on the date, it is possible to see a copy of this report which can reveal a lot of details which often don't show up in the Background of the Child to be Adopted, including the name of the person who found the child, and the exact location the child was found.

Sometimes, we can find this information in another place, without needing to visit that local police station.

So often, the "Background of the Child to be Adopted" document has few details. Some of the possible reasons for this are discussed in other parts of this website, so I won't repeat them here, and instead just say that our first task is analyzing the situation to find out how and where we may be able to find missing details.

In cases like this, it is very important to follow up sooner than later, because trails get cold over time -- witnesses at the location or in the community move away, hospital delivery room employees change jobs, local officials get transferred, records go away, and so forth. By starting as soon as possible, we maximize our chances for success, and minimize the time and costs associated with trying to solve a case.

An example of a roundabout case from a 1970s adoption:

An adopted female who had become an adult had submitted her documents, and was calling our office frequently wanting updates, too eager to find her mother. She also had a very limited budget. Her documentation was only one document, an English translation of a birth certificate, with incomplete information. She had no Thai version of the names and only two poorly transliterate surnames with two apparent nicknames, not any real first Thai names apparently, plus an alleged address. She had been placed in the orphanage almost immediately after birth.

The mother's surname was not clear. It looked possibly Lao, maybe not Thai, but there were many possible ways it could be transliterated thereby leaving us with far too many leads for finding her family. It was feasible to find her only if we had her legal first name, too.

A search for both full names turned up nothing. This would have been expected if the recorded first names were in fact nicknames, as we could not have found them that way since nicknames do not exist in official records.

Neither parental surname existed in the local subdistrict of birth, though the paternal surname existed in distant parts of Thailand, and the maternal surname existed in many places depending on how we transliterated it, with far too many families to contact within a reasonable budget. The father's surname had a few ways it could be spelled in Thai, but wasn't nearly as bad as the mother's surname, though still a lot of families to cover on a very limited budget.

The customer's father had not been encouraging of the adoption tracing. Information had been conveyed that the mother died during child birth so the child was placed into adoption. However, we did not put too much weight on this because we have found many biological parents alive and well despite reports they were deceased. People sometimes try to bury their past and keep it secret (though often overly sensitive about their past...)

The customer was adopted by the foreign family just 2 months after birth. Given that home births were common during that time, there was a significant possibility that the child was not documented with the government but went straight to the orphanage, as was possible in the early 1970s.

It was common for biological parents to make up a name and an address in order to prevent the government from finding them and returning the child to them or to their extended family.

We didn't know, but we had to consider all these possibilities. We would pursue the information in the documentation, but we would be flexible and pursue other avenues within budget.

About nicknames, as noted elsewhere on this website, it is conventional in Thai culture to have a nickname, usually one syllable, which people go by with family, friends and community, but does not exist in official records. To go by your legal first name is too formal in friendship and community circles, though you would normally address someone of significantly higher status by their legal first name at least the first few times. Often, people don't even know each others' legal first names. Most commonly, the nickname is just one syllable of a first name. A lady named Wanna could have the nickname Na (last syllable) or Wan (first syllable) but not both. A lady named Pon could have the name Siripon or Nongpon or ****pon. Often, the nickname has no relation to the name, e.g., a man named Kittisak could have the nickname Chai. Anyway, we were searching by somebody by nickname because we did not have their real name.

The father's nickname was unusual, one we had never heard before. The mother's nickname was somewhat common. We had known a few people with the mother's nickname, both males and females.

As we could not find either parent's family surname anywhere in that region, there was the possibility that they were either migrant workers who didn't set root into the area lasting up until today, or else the names could have been made up, which is common when people put a child up for adoption and don't want to be traced by the government.

However, we had a clear address on this translated birth certificate, so we could pursue the address on a very limited budget. The address was from the early 1970s, and the subdistrict addresses had been reorganized and renumbered, but we can often find an old address by finding an old government document about the reorganization or asking old-timers in the vicinity.

Standard operating procedure is to go by paper documentation first, systematically, rather than seek tips or witness testimony, as the latter is often unreliable and misleading, with many cases of wasted time and resources on dead ends due to people trying too much to help. About addresses, experience has revealed that places where poor people know about the option of an orphanage, there can be multiple children put into the orphanage, which means we can get the wrong biological parent(s).

Our first item was to try to find a Thai birth certificate at a local district office of the registered address, based on the birth date. However, since the child was placed into the orphanage so soon after birth, there was a significant chance that it was a home birth and then transit to an orphanage without registration of birth. Nonetheless, we started this process. We never did find a Thai birth certificate for this child at the local district office. Notably, maybe this is why the customer did not have one, either. (Remember, this was a long time ago when adoptions could be arranged with incomplete documentation, unlike 1980+.)

Likewise, we eventually found the old house registration listing the occupants of that old address at the time, but it did not list anybody by either surname.

We also started to pursue documentation from the orphanage, but the orphanage which the child was adopted from in the early 1970s no longer existed, and some research revealed it closed in the late 1970s and was converted into another institution. Notably, the Thai government temporarily halted all the nongovernmental adoption centers in the late 1970s and set up a standardized system in order to stop some abuses of the system, as noted elsewhere on this website. This particular orphanage never resumed after that temporary halt and reorganization.

Where was the documentation was for this long gone orphanage? That was unknown. For sure, it was long gone from that location.

Besides, that orphanage was about 100 km from the address on the birth certificate, a long distance for a poor person to travel at that time with a child. In cases like this, it is more common that the child was given up at another location and eventually found it way thru the network of Buddhist temples, clinics, and government services to the proper orphanage, with some documentation possibly lost along the way. We found that at the time of the adoption, in the early 1970s, there were 8 temples in the area which took in adopted babies and passed them thru the network. It looked like a potentially time consuming process in hope of finding paper documentation going back 35 years.

Nevertheless, we added to our itinerary to try to find orphanage documentation for this child, starting with trying to find where the paper documentation for that old orphanage might be stored. Often, the administrator was a senior person, who now would either be deceased or retired, and the documentation passed on and put into storage somewhere by somebody less involved. Hopefully, there had not been a lot of moving, nor neglect, termites hadn't gotten to it, and it hadn't gotten wet whereby the pages stuck together or otherwise degraded.

For cases outside of central Thailand, we usually try to engage contacts we have in those regions to assist our agents. Strangers and people from Bangkok are often received with considerable reservation. (One of the first things they usually ask us is whether we work for a mass media organization or any governmental entity, foreign or domestic, all of which would normally stop or dramatically slow down and complicate the situation.) Whether we need to use a contact, and if so then how, depends upon the region.

This case was in a rural region of Thailand which has its own distinctive local accent and ways of doing things, whereby we would appear to be the equivalent of New York city slickers walking into a rural Texas community. Fortunately, we have contacts to help us.

With the help from some key officials, we were able to find a conversion of the old address to the new address. When we visited the address, nobody there recognized, much less knew anything, about either of the two people listed at that address 35 years before. Nor did the neighbors. Many people were trying to help. Maybe it was a faked address given at the orphanage.

At first, we did not tell the occupants of the address that we were doing adoption tracing, only that we were looking for a particular person by name. This is part of our standard operating procedure, to reveal only enough information to find somebody, then to see if information they tell us confirms we have the right person. First, a name. If nothing, then a second name. If nothing, then a date. Fourthly, that this is adoption tracing. The fourth item got a bingo.

The locals immediately mentioned a lady of a nearby house number who had given up a child for adoption very close to that same time, the only one they were aware of. We asked what her name is, and they knew only her nickname, which was the exact same as the nickname of the biological mother. This nickname wasn't very common, though not uncommon. After some discussion with the customer, we decided to try this angle as a shortcut, given the limited budget.

However, this lady had subsequently moved, though thru the community grapevine they could find her, and also found an associate of the lady who took the child to the orphanage. The history was that the lady's husband had abandoned her for another lady during her pregnancy, she was poor with other children, so she put this last one into the care of a temple for adoption soon after birth and went back to work to support her family. The community knew this history.

We eventually found this potential mother, and after we arrived, somebody went out and got the man who took the child to the orphanage. The lady and her whole family and community were very happy to apparently be found by the child after the child had become an adult. We showed all the photos and then started asking them questions.

Unfortunately, when we asked her for the name of the biological father, she gave us a completely different legal name and nickname than was on the birth certificate. She had previous children with the same father, who she raised. We did not tell her the father's surname on the birth certificate, but we asked her if she knew anybody with the father's nickname. She said she never knew anybody by that nickname. She also said that she reported her true address on the forms, not the address we had, though it was fairly nearby.

Everybody really wanted to be reunited with the daughter ... but this looked like a false positive, with a lot of coincidence, but a serious mixup of documentation somewhere along the way. Or else a trick? But it did not seem like anybody was tricking us. Everybody seemed genuinely sincere and interested in finding out the truth, not trying to convince us of anything. We didn't rule out anything, but a DNA test would have been required. Before taking that step, we still had some other paths to pursue.

The man who brought this lady's child to the orphanage had useful information. This clarified the route of children of that region to the orphanage where the child was adopted.

We were eventually able to meet a person who had the old documentation. It was an old book with the pages a bit brown from oxidation but had survived the tropical environment very well. We went thru the log and found the record for our customer, including the name of her adoptive foreign father. They had the surname of the father spelled in Thai but no further information on the mother. The child had taken the father's surname. The record stated that the mother had signed a release form to put the baby into adoption. If accurate, that would mean the mother didn't die during child birth as the customer had been told.

Interestingly, we found the record of the other, false positive lady in this same documentation. She had also placed her daughter into adoption at nearly the same time, shortly after birth. This confirmed that nobody was trying to trick us. It was a big coincidence, but I've seen many coincidences in my life.

The book also noted that the biological mother had signed consent for adoption. If correct (big assumption) then she would not have died at childbirth.

Given a confirmation of a particular Thai spelling of the father's surname, we planned to pursue families around Thailand with the same surname, if there weren't too many, starting with adjacent provinces and moving outward, but also along the border with Laos by the mother's surname.

However, our official contact had gone back and spent hours in the old storage area leafing thru subdistrict documents at that time and in this case it yielded a result. He found the surname of the mother in another house in the community. A family of 5 had moved into a house in the subdistrict just 10 days before the birth, and moved out just a month after the adoption had been completed. Very unusual indeed.

On the document, it noted the province and subdistrict that they had moved in from, and back to after the adoption. That location was very close to the Lao border. There was a teenage lady in that household at that time who was a potential mother. The nickname of the mother on the original romanized birth certificate clearly could have been a nickname derivative of the teenager's father, who was head-of-household on this document. He could have written his own nickname as her name, in order to protect her identity. We do not jump to conclusions, but one possibility which is a fairly common occurrance is that there was a teenage pregnancy out of wedlock and the family was trying to hide this shameful event from their community, which would also explain why they moved to this district for only a very short time surrounding the late pregnancy and delivery.

If she had died during childbirth, as the adoptee's foreign adoptive father had told her, then this would have been noted on this house certificate, according to normal standard operating procedure in Thailand whereby a death is noted on a house certificate around the time of cremation. But it was not, which indicated that the mother survived childbirth and may well be still alive today.

The customer was very confused and didn't quite accept this completely. She had been told and always believed that the mother had died during child birth. We had to explain to her that we have found many people alive who had been reported as deceased in other documentation. If we don't see a death certificate or a notation in the proper official document that the person is deceased, then we do not assume it is true. It took awhile for the customer to assimilate this possibility in her mind.

Finding this document was a big break because we finally had the name transliterated into Thai script, which we could subsequently search for, rather than multiple variations. We also had a potential family subdistrict. Notably, the mother's surname was not any Thai word, and everybody was relieved to finally have a spelling. Many Thais have Lao, Chinese, Khmer, Malay, and quasi-Burmese surnames that have just been transliterated into Thai by however some provincial official did it about 100 years ago.

Starting at this point, the case which started with vague documentation could be reset to being a case with much clearer documentation as regards at least one family name and highly probable family region, though still no surety about the mother's first name. Nonetheless, the probability of solving this case shot up, with the main issue now being cooperation of the biological family.

The rest of this case is less remarkable as we quickly traced the rest of the way. However, what the above illustrates is how we must be careful to verify facts at each stage one step at a time, be careful about coincidences and witness testimony, and follow records searches and documented facts as much as possible rather than rely too much on what people in the community say with the best of intentions. Nonetheless, it is very important to personally engage locals, especially local officials, in cases where we must find somebody based on vague leads and without complete enough information to identify biological parents purely by records searches.

> Issues and Procedures > Search methodology

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