Tag Archives: adoption

How do I discover if I am Provisionally Adopted?

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To discover if you are affected by a Provisional Adoption Order issued in the UK is quite easy.  It is a two step process and requires that you have access to your UK Birth Certificate.

1) Your first step is to look at the long version of your birth certificate issued by the General Register Office.  There are two versions of your birth certificate, a long version (complete information) and a short version (contains your name, gender and place of birth).  It is only the long one that will give you the necessary information.  On a birth certificate for someone adopted, column (6) contains the the date of the adoption order and description of the court by which it was made.  My column (6) contains the words:

Provisional Adoption Order, Second October 1969, Sheffield County Court

If you find similar wording it means that you too are provisionally adopted.

2) Your next step after confirming that you are provisionally adopted is to look for further information of an adoption.  This would take the shape of an adoption form issued in the country that your adopting parents come from.  You should also have other identifying papers or a social security number issued by the same country as the adoption happened in.  So for example I would have been issued with a social security number from the USA if I had been legally adopted there.  If you cannot find any of these papers then you will need to ask your adopting parents for them, this can of course be tricky.  At this point if you have found these papers or your parents have given them to you, everything is fine and you will have been legally adopted.

If on the other hand you have not been able to locate these papers yourself and your adopting parents do not have them then you will need ask them for the details of your legal adoption.  Once you have the details you will need to approach the authorities and ask them to do a search for your adoption papers.  In my search I have found the authorities to be sympathetic and helpful in this.  If at this point your papers are discovered, read through them to verify that everything is correct and rest assured that you were legally adopted.

If you, like I did, discover at this point that there never was an adoption in any country, you have entered into a profoundly strange and difficult place.  The first thing you must do is seek legal help to sort this mess out.  I wish that I could give clear guidelines but currently there are none.  The second thing you are going to need is an adoption counsellor to help you realign your life as there are some major adjustments ahead.  I wish I could say that everything will be sorted and go back to normal, but unfortunately the fact that you were not legally adopted ensures that it cannot return to normal even if and when everything else is sorted.

Thoughts about my search

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“The reasons for searching are to learn, to make informed decisions, to evaluate applications of knowledge, to find truth”… Mona McCormick

I have spent a lot of time searching for information about the Provisional Adoption Order.  At times it is has felt as if there are too many questions and that for every question answered there are ten questions that have only just been discovered.  Yet the experience of searching has been all encompassing, driven as it is for personal and emotional reasons.  The search almost threatens to take over and become the reason for searching.  So reminding oneself  that the actual goal is not only to have the information but once you have it, to do something with it.

“Certain kinds of information will become obsolete, and knowing how to think has become as important as knowing what to think.”  Sonia Bodi.

During a search you have to scan every scrap of information that you come across to find what might be a clue.  But not every lead is a good lead and just because you have found something does not mean that you should keep hold of it or use it.  The acquiring of information is a skill but it does not make us wise; wisdom is taking information and applying it, knowing how to use it appropriately in the correct setting for the desired result.  So as I scan the various bits of information I have to choose what to use and what to ignore and for that I must have a filter, and this is something that has changed as I have discovered more.

As I have searched I have made the shocking (to me anyway) discovery that there is actually very little real information saved anywhere for someone who has been Provisionally Adopted.  This came to light during a recent conversation with an archivist who told me that while there was a legal obligation for the courts to store adoption records it was different with Provisional Adoption Orders.  More often than not the applicants (those seeking a Provisional Adoption Order) were handed the complete and only court record and that virtually nothing was kept in the court archive.  There would have been exceptions, but as there was no legal reason for the courts to follow up the applicants beyond issuing them with a Provisional Adoption Order.  The reality was why waste time when there was nothing that the court could do if it was discovered that no adoption had taken place.

With that in mind and as I wait for an answer from the final archive to arrive, I have slowly come to the realisation that maybe I have been approaching this the wrong way.  I have been involved in wide sweeping searches for any information relating to my Provisional Adoption.  The results have been depressing, not only is there no evidence that there ever was any attempt at adoption, but the strong probability is that apart from the records that I hold there is no other evidence to support the existence of a Provisional Adoption either.  This leaves me in a totally different place and one where I am unsure what to do next.  I have answered my initial question but found that I now have a totally different ball park to work in and one that I am not sure that I like very much.

So a word of advice to anyone who is adopting – make sure that you get legal assistance and that you double or triple check that you have done everything possible to ensure that the adoption is done correctly.  Don’t leave anything to chance or wishful thinking!

 

Clause 24.

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During the Commons sitting on the 25th July 1958 the matter of Clause 24 of the Children Bill was raised.  This might seem quite cryptic and obscure but in the history of the Provisional Adoption Order it is quite interesting.  It started with Mr. Deputy-Speaker (Sir Charles MacAndrew) saying:

I suggest that all the Amendments to Clause 24, except those in page 14, lines 39 and 40, in the name of the hon. Member for Widnes (Mr. MacColl), might be taken together. The other two may be taken separately. If Divisions are wanted, Mr. Speaker will be quite happy for Divisions to take place.

The debate that followed demonstrated that while the idea of providing for those not permanently resident in the UK to adopt, the mechanism was recognized as being problematical.  Before 1958 it was not possible by law for a non-domiciled person in the UK to adopt a child with UK citizenship.  This of course caused problems for British citizens living in far flung parts of the British Empire who wanted to adopt from the UK.  In order to address this problem Clause 24 was introduced, but was soon seen to be a problem in certain quarters.  The main concern was that the vehicle to be used was called a ‘Provisional Adoption Order’.  This Order gave the persons applying to adopt permission to remove a UK child to another country where there may or may not have been adequate law in place to ensure the safety of the child.  While a child adopted in the UK would be protected by the UK legal system, a child for whom a Provisional Adoption Order had been issued, the UK legal system no longer had any control.  In fact in a recent conversation with a court archivist, I was told that the chances of discovering the court records of a adoption was quite high while the changes of finding any records relating to a Provisional Adoption Order was quite low.  The reason for this was quite simple, the papers were more often than not just handed to those applying for the Provisional Adoption Order and usually no copies were kept by the court.

The end of the discussion that July is quite telling, a Mr Lipton in answer to the then Secretary of State for the Home Department and Lord Privy Seal was:

The public were in no way prepared by the contents of this Report for the conclusions to which the Government suddenly came as a result of which it will now be possible, as an hon. Member opposite said, to have export licensing of children provided for by the law of the land for the first time.

I am sure the Government must agree with this point. In Clause 24 we are taking a gamble. The Under-Secretary knows that she is taking a gamble. It has been made clear by Government spokesmen that there were risks involved in this Clause, which the Government thought on balance ought to be taken. I do not mind taking risks at my own expense, but I object to taking risks and gambling with the lives of children. In retrospect I am sure the Government will agree that they have taken a very serious responsibility upon themselves. I do not think this Third Reading ought to be allowed to proceed without some reference being made to this fact.

The Government are taking a gamble on the future of these children and, what is worse, we shall never know whether this gamble has come off. Even if we did get to know, no one would be able to do anything about it. Goodness knows what tragedy may occur as a result of this, of which we shall never know, but the Government will say, “The Act is working very smoothly. No evidence has been brought to our notice that any child who has been allowed to go abroad is not as happy as any other child in this country.” I know that the rest of the Bill makes many useful and desirable provisions, but from my point of view this Bill will always be tainted by the inclusion in it of the Clause which enables child to be exported abroad.

What I have discovered in my search is that this gamble did not “come off”.  While for many it might have resulted in a happy existence, the undeniable problem is that no matter how happy they might have been, the reality is that if they were not legally adopted by those who applied and received a Provisional Adoption Order, they are officially ‘nobody’.  We are people hanging in limbo, holding on to an identity given to us by people who legally did not have the right to give us a new name, but at the same time not permitted to use the original identity given to us by our birthparents because we were Provisionally Adopted in the eyes of the UK government.