Records

Who has seen what.

Access to the records has not been all-or-nothing. It has unfolded in a long sequence of individual requests, partial releases, and institutional refusals — sometimes shaped by who knew to ask, sometimes by who was making a film, sometimes by what the public attention of a given year demanded. This page sets out that sequence in chronological form.

Each entry summarizes a publicly described instance of access or attempted access. The list is not exhaustive — many subjects have made requests this archive does not have records of — but it captures the milestones that shape current institutional practice.

1980 After the triplets’ reunion and the public exposure of the program, the adoptive families of Bobby Shafran, Eddy Galland, and David Kellman together approach Louise Wise Services to demand answers. The agency’s response, as described later by the families, includes apology but not substantive disclosure of the study’s design.
1990 The records are given to Yale’s Manuscripts and Archives, in Sterling Memorial Library, by the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services. The collection is catalogued as MS 1585, sealed under deed-of-gift terms until October 25, 2065. Access from this point on is governed by the deed.
1995 Lawrence Wright, in “Double Mystery” (The New Yorker, August 7, 1995), addresses the program in the context of broader reporting on twin research. The piece is one of the first sustained mainstream-press treatments of the design, written in part from interviews with figures connected to the work. It does not draw on the sealed archive.
2002–2004 Elyse Schein contacts Louise Wise Services for nonidentifying information about her birth family. The agency, after a slow correspondence, informs her that she has an identical twin sister. On April 13, 2004, an agency social worker calls Paula Bernstein with the same news; the two women meet within days, in mid-April 2004. The agency does not, at this contact, describe the research study.
2004–2007 During the research and writing of Identical Strangers, Bernstein and Schein conduct independent interviews with figures connected to the study, including communication with Peter Neubauer. They are denied substantive access to the records. The book is published in 2007 with the institutional record they could assemble from outside the archive.
c. 2014–2017 The director Lori Shinseki conducts the production interviews that will become The Twinning Reaction. Subjects featured in the documentary describe being able to obtain limited material about themselves from the agency and from Yale, in advance of the film.
2017–2018 The director Tim Wardle conducts the production interviews that will become Three Identical Strangers. Yale officials are interviewed on camera; the institutional position they describe — that the records remain sealed under the deed of gift — becomes part of the film.
2018 Following the theatrical release of Three Identical Strangers, Yale and the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services agree to release portions of the records to identified subjects who request them. Releases are redacted, slow, and limited in scope to material about the requester rather than about the requester’s twin or triplet.
2019–present A small number of subjects who have spoken publicly describe receiving partial files through this process. Other subjects describe being unable to confirm whether records about them exist. The collection as a whole remains closed.

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