How a Romanian found out that he was adopted after a request to the MAI. “No one should end up here”

A 34-year-old man from Bucharest found out that he was adopted when he accessed the platform of the Ministry of the Interior, because he needed a record. He's telling his story to Public Record, saying he wants to show “how the state takes care of our personal data.”

“The way I found out I was adopted is unacceptable,” says Tudor, who adds that “nobody should end up in this situation.”

In 2024, Tudor says he wanted to find out what my ascendant is, for which you need the time of birth. When his mother told him he “didn't remember exactly,” he made an email request to the hospital where he knew he was born.

“I did this more out of curiosity, because in a group therapy session I realized that I didn't know much about when I came into the world,” says Tudor.

The man told how he found out he was adopted from the state's database.

“I needed the criminal record for employment, so I accessed gîsheul.ro. From there I arrived at the website of the Ministry of the Interior: hub.mai.gov.ro. I pressed the request record button and a pre-filled application with my data appeared, but with a bonus: my previous last name!”, recalls Tudor.

The man says the request puzzled him: “I've had one last name all my life. There was never a clue that made me question it.”

Tudor also says that he ignored what he had seen on the ministry's website for several days, thinking it was a system error.

“Stayed in My Mind”

Tudor says that he remembered the field with the name “previous” and gradually began to ask himself questions.

“I was telling myself that in a database of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MAI) there really can't be any mistakes. After I asked for the file, I received the answer from the hospital: the mother had not given birth there. I thought that I don't know where I was born, that maybe it's still an error,” says Tudor.

One day, Tudor looked at the birth certificate and saw that it was issued almost four months after he was born.

Long line of research

His search did not stop. In February 2025, he went to the town hall, from there he reached the National Authority for Child Protection and Adoption, and finally found out who he was.

“Before receiving the official email response, they called me to tell me that the adoption was being confirmed and they only had data on the biological mother, the father being unknown,” Tudor says.

To find out who the woman who gave birth to him is, Tudor had to sue the National Authority for the Protection of Children's Rights and Adoption.

“I found out that my biological mother was 13 and a half years old when I was born. They gave me the date and place of her birth. Because she was a minor, they asked me if I wanted them to contact her and if I wanted the grandparents to be contacted as well. It was a shock to find out that I gave birth to a child. I expected her to be very young, but not a child,” says Tudor.

MAI reaction

Tudor requested MAI explanations about the data they manage.

“They answered me nonchalantly that it's about 'spot cases, caused by human operating errors.' That's how I found out from them that the secret of my adoption was compromised by bureaucratic negligence,” says Tudor.

“The ways in which adoption information has been recorded in the RNEP has been inconsistent since its inception, which is why setting up a web service that exhaustively excludes all adoptions is difficult to achieve, especially for records prior to 2015, when the system was overhauled and data migrated“, it is stated in the MAI's response to Tudor's request.

The young man did not tell his parents that he found out they had adopted him, and his adoptive mother refused to contact him.

“It's a very difficult secret to keep. But they are old and sick, how would it help them to know that I know?”, mentions Tudor.