original birth certificates

New York City and state were inundated by requests from adoptees seeking their original birth certificates this week, as a new law went into effect granting unrestricted access for the first time in more than 80 years.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) ended decades of secrecy around adoptions in New York on Thursday, signing a landmark reform bill to allow adult adoptees unrestricted access to their original birth certificates.

The New York State legislature passed a raft of historic child welfare bills this year. All of them aimed to strengthen birth family ties: one bill would open access to original birth certificates for adoptees; another increases the standard of evidence in child neglect cases, and decreases the consequences of such investigations for parents; four other bills boost support for relatives and family friends who care for someone else’s child.

Cindy Sippin solved a very old puzzle recently. She’d set out to build her family tree using a DNA genealogy service, as many adoptees like her do, and had traced 47 “twigs,” her word for ancestral sequences going back to her great-great-grandparents.