Studying the present time poses a major challenge to the relationship between history and justice, especially in those processes that are still open and in which there are no official records or they are not contained in the truth reports. This article seeks to think through a research history on forced adoptions in Chile, around the materials, tensions, and relationship with justice over these years. Our main general questions were: what are the main issues in accessing archives of the past-present? Which role do oral sources and memory archives play today? And what possibilities and issues are associated with the use of social media as repositories of testimonies and non-traditional sources? Along with these, we specifically ask ourselves about: what are the contributions of the subject history to grasping forced adoptions in Chile? And what challenges does research in this field of study face? With this paper, presented in the V International Seminar on History of the Present Time, we seek to address these questions from a research history.