Can you find the birth parents of someone born in 1900 who was adopted?

[Couldyoubesqueakyclean]

My maternal grandmother was born in 1900 and was adopted. My late mum told me that one old auntie knew the truth about her mother’s birth parents and took it to the grave. Mum assumed her mother had been born out of wedlock and perhaps
adopted by a sibling of one of the parents but that’s speculation.

Mum I did some family tree research back in the 1990s (when it involved looking on microfiche!) and drew a blank on my grandmother’s birth parents. However it’s only just occurred to me there may be a way nowadays to find out more.

Does anyone know what options I might have if I decided to look into it? I’ve not signed up to any genealogy sites, nor any DNA sites because this has literally just occurred to me as a possibility.

What would be the best approach?

(Records are Scottish if that makes a difference. Also my mum and her siblings are no longer alive so the focus would be on records rather than personal information)

Maybe go through the family for registered births and see if ones missing from further lines? I know years ago it was common for unmarried mothers or families with to many kids to 'give one away' to family members without children. A friend of mine had a brother who was given to her aunt and she brought him up as her own. No adoption papers though. She found out he was her brother and not her cousin when they were both in their 20s

You could ask on Rootschat Scotland? The DNA test is foolproof at establishing close ish genetic relationships where paper trails are missing or fake, it might at least help you narrow things down. Good luck!

Short answer = possibly, but you will need a lot of research.

Longer answer = Adoption was only legalised in Scotland in 1930. Before then, it was ad hoc and informal. Children sent to live with extended family and not told their real parentage. Agencies operating independently to match babies and parents. Children sent overseas. There was no legal requirement for checking, or record keeping, or anything else. You are therefore staggeringly unlikely to find a record of the adoption because there was most likely never one in the first place.

DNA can help, but again you are dependent on many other external factors. Your mum is no longer here, so you or a sibling could take a DNA test. You would share 25% of your DNA with this grandmother and about 12.5% with each of her unknown parents. If you test, you would be looking for matches with second cousins - people who share that same set of great grandparents, or half second cousins who share just one. Ancestry or any other site cannot ever tell you HOW you are related to someone else, they can just tell you how much DNA you share, in centimorgans.

It's then up to you to put together a tree to work out where all these matches fit in - and that can be equally difficult if they don't reply to emails or have trees online. Sometimes it's easy, other times really hard. You'd need to sort all your matches into paternal matches and maternal matches and then go from there. A very common scenario is to get down to a particular family group living in a particular area but not being able to identify which of three brothers is a parent, or was it perhaps a cousin or an uncle?

There are lots of DNA groups on FB which will help, and |I suggest familiarising yourself with the Shared cM project tool dnapainter.com/tools/sharedcmv2

Oh and also meant to mention - it was very common for names to be changed on "adoption". I was working with a client a while back whose father was born as John BELL, he was "adopted" by his mother's married sister, and brought up as John ANDERSON. Client had drawn a total blank on searching for the birth of John Anderson, because that wasn't his birth name. There will be a birth record - but knowing what name to search under is the hard bit.

These are amazing insights, thank you everyone!

Hi OP. I do family history and belong to Ancestry which has birth, death etc. records and the censuses. It occurred to me that if your GM was not adopted immediately after her birth, she might be on the 1901 census under her original name. A possible way to trace back would be to find her on the 1939 Register, which would give her actual date of birth, and then look back over the census records, which might come up with something. PM me if I can help you with this. I would be happy to look these up for you.