Now More Than Ever, It’s Important To Safely Back Up Any Documents You Have Which Contain Birth Parent Information!
If You Submit A Petition For Information Disclosure (Birth Family Search Request) Through NCRC Via The KAS Website Starting September 16th, 2025 — We Strongly Urge ALL Korean Adoptees To Submit Good Quality PDF Scans (Copies) Of Your Most Relevant Adoption Documents Through The KAS Website — Even If You Do NOT Have Birth Parent Information In Your Adoption Documents!
However, Please Do So Especially IF There IS Birth Parent Information In Your Adoption Documents!
Please Read Below To Understand Why!
Posted to Paperslip on May 1st, 2025.
Related:
NEW! Step By Step KSS Adoptee Birth Family Search
Regarding The Future Of Birth Family Search Through NCRC and KAS
FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) Request For US Adoptees (Please Note That FOIA Requests Are Currently Being Up To 80% Redacted — Best To Wait To File If It Is Not Urgent!)
Hankookilbo / Korea Times Article:
”Korean adoption system misidentifies birth parents, 15 years of errors go unchecked”
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KSS (Korea Social Service) Adoptees—Please See The Special Note At The Bottom Of This Page.
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For any Korean Adoptees who already have birth parent information in their English and / or Korean adoption documents, IT IS SO IMPORTANT TO SAFELY BACK UP THESE FILES NOW!
For ANY Korean Adoptees who already have ANY adoption documents AT ALL,
IT IS SO IMPORTANT TO SAFELY BACK UP THESE FILES NOW!
This is because there is the possibility that you may NEVER be able to get such documents from your Korean Adoption Agency or NCRC / KAS again. And currently (as of May 2025) US FOIA requests are being up to 80% redacted. We hope that FOIA requests will be less redacted in the future.
AFTER July 19th, 2025, it will no longer be possible to request a birth family search through the 4 major Korean Adoption Agencies, whose Post Adoption Services will PERMANENTLY CLOSE.
The 4 major Korean Adoption Agenices are:
-Holt Children’s Inc. in Korea
-Eastern Social Welfare Society (ESWS) / formerly Eastern Child Welfare Society (ECWS)
-Korea Welfare Society (KWS) / formerly Social Welfare Society (SWS)
-Korea Social Service (KSS)
NOTE:
AFTER July 19th, 2025, the two Korean Government Agencies which work together and which will be in charge of birth family search for ALL Korean Adoptees are:
*NCRC = National Center for the Rights of the Child.
NCRC will take physical possession of ALL Korean Adoption files starting July 19th, 2025.
*KAS = Korea Adoption Services.
ALL Korean Adoptees with interest in search will have to conduct a birth family search through the KAS site AFTER July 19th, 2025.
ALL Korean Adoption Agency files for ALL Korean Adoptees move to the Korean Government Agency NCRC (National Center for the Rights of the Child) beginning on July 19th, 2025, and it is widely believed that this process will me a MESS which could potentially take YEARS to sort out. As of May 3rd, 2025, NCRC finally has a TEMPORARY storage facility for the Korean Adoption Agency files which they are supposed to take over in less than 3 months from all 4 of the major Korean Adoption Agencies in Korea.
We strongly believe that there is a high likelihood that during this file transfer process or during the subsequent process of file digitization, Korean Adoption Agency files could get mixed up or PERMANENTLY LOST.
We would love to be wrong about this, but unfortunately, we DO NOT think we will be wrong.
It’s also important to know that NCRC spent 10 years doing a TERRIBLE job of digitizing files from Korean Orphanages, where many Korean Adoptees spent time prior to being adopted or transferred to Korean Adoption Agencies. NCRC contracted the creation of a records management system to a vendor who created a horribly non-functional system which renders search through this system effectively USELESS.
Simply put, NCRC is perpetually and likely deliberately underfunded and understaffed by the Korean Government so that the birth family search process for Korean Adoptees is an unnecessarily difficult and nearly impossible process to navigate. The entire system is designed to PREVENT Korean Adoptees from finding their birth parents.
THEREFORE IT IS IMPORTANT NOW MORE THAN EVER TO SAFELY BACK UP WHATEVER ADOPTION FILES YOU ALREADY HAVE—ESPECIALLY IF YOUR ADOPTION FILES CONTAIN BIRTH PARENT INFORMATION, SUCH AS NAME AND BIRTHDATE / AGE / BIRTH YEAR.
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To understand why this is so important—let’s say that you are a Korean Adoptee who has birth parent names and birthdates in the adoption documents you already have—whether in English, Korean, or both.
Even if you have birth parent information in the documents in your possession, it is exceedingly difficult to do a search on your own in Korea due to highly strict birth parent privacy law which restricts Adoptees from doing independent searches through Jumin Centers, Police Stations, City Halls, etc. It has always been and will likely always be nearly impossible to do a true birth family search on your own (without the help of NCRC / KAS after July 19th, 2025) if you are not physically in Korea.
This means that most Adoptees are reliant upon either their Korean Adoption Agency (until July 19th, 2025) or upon NCRC / KAS (after July 19th, 2025) to conduct a birth family search on their behalf. NCRC / KAS have access to a database where they can search for an Adoptee’s birth parents’ information, *but they can only search based on the information that THEY HAVE.
THIS is why it’s SO IMPORTANT to back up any documents containing birth parent information which you may already have in your possession! Because you CANNOT count on the transfer of files from the Korean Adoption Agencies to NCRC to be perfectly smooth and to entail no loss / mix up of adoption files. The subsequent digitization of adoption files at NCRC may also be a years long MESS!
IF you already have documents containing birth parent information, you should assume that it will be best to provide COPIES (NOT ORIGINALS) of that information for NCRC / KAS IF you request a birth family search through them AFTER July 19th, 2025. NCRC / KAS will likely NOT be transparent about the information that they have about your history. So try to GIVE THEM the information that you have so that they can do a search for your birth parents through their system!
PRIOR to July 19th, 2025, the Korean Adoption Agencies and NCRC / KAS have collaborated on the birth family searches for Adoptees. However, AFTER July 19th, 2025, NCRC / KAS will be the ONLY OFFICIAL route for a birth family search in Korea. The Post Adoption Services units of the 4 major Korean Adoption Agencies will effective CLOSE.
Since the 4 major Korean Adoption Agencies—Holt Children’s Inc. in Korea; Eastern Social Welfare Society (ESWS) / formerly Eastern Child Welfare Society (ECWS); Korea Welfare Society (KWS) / formerly Social Welfare Society (SWS); and Korea Social Service (KSS)—have for DECADES had SOLE possession of the thousands of adoption files of Korean Adoptees, this means that BEFORE July 19th, 2025, NCRC / KAS does / did NOT have possession of these files.
The transfer of these thousands of Korean Adoption Agency files to NCRC beginning on July 19th, 2025 means that now only ONE Korean Government agency—NCRC—will have physical possession of ALL Korean Adoption Agency files. But the physical transport and storage of these files to NCRC is likely to be a MESS. And this means that many Adoptees’ precious history may be LOST—either in the file transfer process, or the digitization process—or both.
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Help Yourself By Helping NCRC Identify You!
The thing that hurts us the most about the transfer of ALL Korean Adoption Agency files to the Korean Government Agency NCRC starting July 19th, 2025, is that due to the lack of transparency of the birth family search process on the part of NCRC, there may be no way to know upon which documents that NCRC is basing a birth family search after the file transfer.
Please see this disturbing Hankook Ilbo / Korea Times article from June 18th, 2025:
”Korean adoption system misidentifies birth parents, 15 years of errors go unchecked”
IF NCRC relies upon improperly digitized files for a search, then this could mean that you could effectively end up with thousands of cases where searches are done based on the wrong information - with all of the attendant consequences of that, such as false disappointment of an Adoptee if a birth family search fails, or, in the worst case scenario, false reunion of the wrong Adoptee with the wrong set of birth parents.
For this reason we strongly urge ALL Korean Adoptees who submit a birth family search request to NCRC via the KAS website starting September 16th, 2025 to submit GOOD QUALITY SCANS of the adoption documents YOU ALREADY HAVE IN YOUR POSSESSION in PDF format through the KAS website when you submit your Petition for Adoption Information Disclosure (birth family search request).
At least this way NCRC can have a better way to identify you.
Even if the documents YOU have in your possession do NOT have birth parent information, at least submitting copies of your own adoption documents may help NCRC to identify you in their system.
And IF the documents YOU have in your possession DO have birth parent information, then it's even MORE important to submit copies of that information in PDF format to NCRC via the KAS website when you submit your birth family search request.
In other words - we need to be PRO-ACTIVE to try to help ensure that NCRC can at least identify us properly.
This is especially important because NCRC will only spend a limited amount of time on each birth family search request by an Adoptee! So it will greatly benefit you to GET ORGANIZED BEFORE you submit your request to NCRC via the KAS website.
Does this make sense? We hope it does!