11.   In March, after years of sporadic searching and with help from adoption records, Mrs. Williams, who lives in Minneapolis, found her mother.

12.   In this country, compared to several other nations, adoption records are largely sealed.

13.   Like tens of thousands of adoptees and birth parents, Warrick had to plow through official roadblocks designed to seal adoption records permanently.

14.   Many states closed adoption records around the middle of the century to protect families from the stigma that was then associated with adoption.

15.   National statistics on how many single men have adopted are not available because adoption records are confidential.

16.   Now that Maryland has opened my adoption record, I am appealing to the courts in Washington, D.C., to unseal my birth certificate.

17.   On separate but parallel tracks that would eventually bring them to each other, they began taking steps in Washington to get the adoption records unsealed.

18.   Sandberg, the lawyer who gathered the adoption records for the author, said that Wilkomirski had not to his knowledge taken any legal steps to challenge the records.

19.   So he went after the details of his sealed adoption record with a vengeance two years ago.

20.   The confidentiality of adoption records has become an increasingly contentious issue in recent years, spawning hundreds of search groups, adoption researchers and birth-mother support groups.