For Cook County, Illinois (Chicago area) Adoption Searches

for Birth Parents

Search by child’s birth name and identify the adoptive parents!

This is a one-of-a-kind, accurate & legal method of obtaining this crucial information. Nearly EVERY Cook County adoption had a ‘legal notice of adoption’ and ‘petition to adopt’ in this publication.

Birthparents, Biological family members – Identify the adoptive parents of the child who was given up for adoption.  From there it’s usually easy to identify your biological child’s name.

Adoptions 1934 through 1963:  Immediate lookups in computer database with a photo image of the actual ‘petition to adopt’ sent to you. If yours is not found, there’s no charge, so no risk.

My late colleague, Edward “Mike” Egan, searched out, photographed and compiled every ‘petition to adopt’ from the Chicago legal newspaper for a 29 year period in order to create this database. The project took him many years and was quite costly.  He assisted countless people with it in his work as an adoption searcher.

1971 through present:  Some dates are searchable immediately in a database. However, most require a rather time-consuming search in the archives.  Contact me for more information including instructions to do it yourself if you prefer.