Adoption knowledge: a citizen-scientific use of FamilySearch to understand Peruvian adoption

This article analyzes the citizen-scientific work conducted by a Peruvian adoptee, co-author Milagros Caroline Forrester, who is collecting, archiving, coding, and analyzing the birth records of Peruvian adoptees she encounters through her ongoing review of FamilySearch, a depository of genealogical data run by the Mormon Church. Forrester's project resembles the personal birthparent searches conducted by many adopted people, but at another scale: becoming "citizen science" through an enlargement of the sample size to hundreds of cases, an analytic approach to the form of each document and what meta-communicative data the form provides, and a determination of the implications and significance of the synthesized results. In her research with birth registries, Forrester was inspired by scientific methodologies in the social sciences, including database creation, management, and analysis, and open coding of textual artifacts. This article shows that the nuance that laypeople bring to personally implicated citizen science can lead to engaged and meaningful findings that reach communities not often heard from in scholarly research. Forrester's study is grounded in an awareness of her fellow adoptees' challenges in finding information about their origins, and ambivalence about the significance of those findings.