Do you have adoption records for 1870 - 1880?
I am looking for an adoption record for my great grandmother in Beaver County, Pennsylvania. She shows up on the 1880 census as the adopted daughter of Jordan Main. Her name before adoption was Jenice Roche. Her birthdate was July 31, 1874 and her name after adoption was Jennie Main.
Best Answers
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Hello @GingerAnn GingerAnn ,
We have many records. I'm including our Research Wiki link.
https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/United_States_Adoption_Research
RESEARCH WIKI https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/Main_Page
A great Research source is Help Feature on FamilySearch.org. Sign into FamilySearch.org and your Family Tree.
On the upper right near to your name is a ? Question Mark. Click on that and when the confusing down box appears, click on "Help Center" at the bottom. When it goes to the next page, click on Research Wiki, put your question in the Search Box.
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@GingerAnn GingerAnn were you able to find the info you were looking for? if not, I would suggest sharing your post with the @Adoption and Unknown Family Research group. They may be able to help
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I worked on adoption cases like this and I thought with the exact date, how many female children named Jenice/Jennie Rocke/Roche were born in Pennsylvania on 31 July 1874? Turns out with the people I was researching, the adoptive parents must not have known the exact date of birth and picked a date because there was no child born on that date in that place that matched.
As for adoption records, according to the orphanage, they were destroyed but some were preserved at the local university. The government agency where the children ended up refused to say anything about the existence of the records even though they were over 110 years old.
That said, Roche/Rocke may not be a common name and you should try researching the family in Pennsylvania because that's where the 1880 census says she was born. It says the parents' birth places are unknown which makes me believe the Main's did not know her parents.
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Another research path is DNA. You may need to be patient. It took 3 years for someone with the right DNA to take the test. According to their trees, they are not related to the same Bentley I am descended from, but they are descended from Bentley so I'm figuring my Bentley is a brother or cousin to their Bentley's and now I have a new area to research.
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