FAQ: Original Birth Certificates

An original birth certificate, often called an “OBC,” is a government-issued vital record that contains the basic facts of a registrant’s birth, including the date of birth, the city or county of birth, and the name of any acknowledged birthparents (the “registrant” is the person who was born and whose birth is being “registered.”) Nearly every person born in the United States in the last 100+ years has an original birth certificate, typically on file today with a state or local vital records office. Adopted people, however, typically have two birth certificates: 1) the original; and 2) an amended record that lists the adoptive person’s adoptive parents as the birthparents

Once a court finalizes an adoption, the court forwards the order for adoption (and often another document known as a certificate of adoption) to the vital records department in the state of the adopted person’s birth. The vital records department in that state uses these documents to locate the original birth record of the adopted person. Once located, the department creates an “amended” or “supplementary” or “replacement” birth record using the order of adoption.

The amended record becomes the new vital record for the adopted person. The amended record almost always changes the name of the adopted person. It also replaces the names of any originally listed birthparents with the names of the new adoptive parents. With these changes, the amended birth certificate creates the impression that the adopted person was “as if” born to his or her adoptive parents. In some states, other facts of the adopted person’s birth may be changed or omitted, such as the name of the hospital of birth, the time of birth, or the actual city or town of birth.

The original birth certificate is typically sealed and made unavailable to the public and, in many states, unavailable to the adopted person, even as an adult. After the state seals the original record, the only birth certificate available to the adopted person is the amended record that lists the adoptive parents as the adopted person’s birthparents.

It means that the original birth certificate cannot be released without a court order or other legal provision allowing its release. In the past, state registrars actually applied sealing wax to the envelope that contained the original record. That wax seal could only be “broken” if the adopted person, as an adult, requested a copy of the original birth certificate or if a court ordered the seal to be broken.

Today, breaking the seal means roughly the same thing. Though wax seals are no longer used to secure the record, copies may be available only after a legal “seal” is broken. States today vary considerably on how an adopted person or others (such as the adopted person’s descendants) may request and obtain a copy of the adopted person’s own sealed original birth record.

No. Many states do not require that a new amended birth certificate be issued to replace the original, especially if the adoptive parents, the adopted person, or the court requests that no new certificate be issued. In such a case the original remains the adopted person’s only birth certificate.

Beginning in the late 1930s states began to seal original birth certificates after adoptions to keep them from becoming publicly available. This was intended to strengthen the adoptive family by restricting any outside interference, including interference from birthparents who had relinquished all rights to the child. Sealing the original and issuing a new amended birth certificate was also a way to “redeem” children born to unmarried parents, specifically single women, by hiding any evidence of an “out-of-wedlock” birth and thus remove the stigma of an “illegitimate” or “bastard” child. As the societal stigma of illegitimacy waned over time, the need to the hide the record had served its purpose, especially after the adoptee became an adult.

Nothing happened to it. States only create a new amended post-adoption birth certificate after an adoption. If no adoption occurs, there is no legal basis to amend the certificate. This is often the case of children placed in foster care and whose parents’ rights are terminated. If they are never adopted out of foster care, the original birth record has always been available to them upon request.

In most states, if an adoption legally fails (e.g., it is annulled or vacated) the amended birth certificate is set aside and the original birth certificate is restored.

These categories relate to whether adult adopted people have an unrestricted right to request and obtain their own original birth certificates, or whether it takes a court order or some other discriminatory or complex process to obtain the record. A map of the states is below, and a list of the unrestricted, compromised, and restricted states is also here, along with a definition of the various discriminatory restrictions in many states. The following are the general definitions for each category (with the number of states in that category indicated in parentheses).

No discriminatory restrictions limit the ability to obtain your own original birth certificate other than an age requirement, typically 18, and payment of a fee to the vital records department for a copy of the vital record. While fourteen states are currently unrestricted, Minnesota will also become unrestricted on July 1, 2024.

A state may provide a copy of the original birth certificate without requiring a court order, but only if certain discriminatory conditions are first met. States, for example, may limit rights based on specific dates of adoption, with those adopted before a certain date having greater rights than those adopted after that date. Other restrictions include the removal or redaction of information on the OBC, or the use of search registries or intermediaries to obtain an OBC. Compromised may also include states where a required fee greatly exceeds the fee normally paid to obtain a government vital record, such as the states of Tennessee and Arkansas.

The state (or the District of Columbia) requires court or birthparent permission for the adult adopted person to obtain a copy of their own original birth certificate.

In almost every case your original birth certificate remains in the state of birth. It is extremely rare, though it has occurred in some circumstances, that a person is born in one state and a birth certificate has been issued in another. I’ve seen two instances of that in the thousands of records I’ve reviewed over the years.

This is a complicated question. First, if you were born in a state that has an unrestricted right for an adopted person to request and obtain his or her own original birth certificate then you simply request your original birth certificate from that state’s vital records department.

If you were born in a state that restricts the release of the original birth certificate but were adopted in a different state, you may have an extremely complicated process ahead of you. Your birth state will often require a court order from the state of your adoption to release the OBC, yet the court in the state of adoption will not issue such an order, believing it has no jurisdiction to order another state to issue a vital record. There are no quick and easy solutions to this problem.