Sealed in a vault until 2065.

What was deposited at Yale

In 1990, the records of the study were given to Yale’s Manuscripts and Archives, in Sterling Memorial Library, by the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services — the parent organization of the Child Development Center. The collection is catalogued as Adoption study records of the Child Development Center, MS 1585. The gift was made under deed-of-gift terms, and those terms — not a court order, not a federal seal — are what restrict access today.

The collection is understood to contain decades of longitudinal observation on the subject children: home visit reports, structured assessment results, films and audio tapes of the children at varying ages, transcripts of interviews with adoptive parents, the researchers’ working notes and correspondence, and administrative material from the program itself.

It is, in other words, the only place where the full picture of what was done to each subject can be reconstructed. The subjects, individually, have parts of their own stories. The institution has the parts only it ever had.

The 2065 date

The most commonly cited date for the records’ release is 2065. By the time that date arrives, every adult who participated in or directed the study will be long dead, and almost every subject will be dead or near it. That is the practical effect of the seal: it does not protect the privacy of subjects so much as it puts the contents of the archive permanently out of the reach of the people the records describe.

The legal framework for the seal is institutional rather than statutory. Yale honors the access restrictions placed by the donor of a collection. The donor, in this case, was the institution that funded and conducted the study. It set the terms; it can change them. So can the surviving institutional successors with the records’ original holders.

What has been released

The seal has been narrowed in practice in two significant ways. First, on the adoption-record side: Spence-Chapin Services to Families and Children, which has held the Louise Wise Services adoption files since the agency’s 2004 closure, has on request disclosed sibling information to adoptees who knew to ask. That is what allowed several of the publicly known reunions to take place after the original wave in the 1980s. Second, on the research-record side: in the years following the release of Three Identical Strangers in 2018, Yale and the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services — the institutional successor to the Child Development Center — agreed to release portions of the study records to identified subjects who requested them, substantially redacted, often slow, and limited to material about the requester themselves rather than their twin or triplet.

The complete archive remains closed. Researchers, journalists, and members of the public — including most of the subjects themselves — cannot read it.

I was a research subject without my consent or knowledge for the first ten or so years of my life. And the records of that experiment are not available to me. — A study subject, paraphrased from documentary interviews

Why this section exists

The records are the heart of the matter. The story of how the study was exposed has been told, often well, in books and films. The story of what the records actually contain has not. Until they are opened, that story can only be told secondhand, through the small set of people who have been allowed glimpses, and through the institutional statements that frame the seal as a necessary protection.

This site argues that the seal protects the institutions more than the subjects. The advocacy page sets out that argument in full and explains how to support it.