Tag Archives: Provisional Adoption Order

Fake ID? or Genuine Name change?

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Since discovering that my adoption was not valid I have lived with the concern that the name that I have grown up with is or could be considered to be ‘fake’. In this day and age, having a fake ID can lead to all kinds of problems and difficulties, so this is a genuine concern. A concern that goes beyond me to my wife – who had her surname changed and also my children – who also bear a potentially fake surname. In fact I have been advised, by well meaning people, to draw as little attention to my ‘almost adopted’ status as possible for that very reason. For me, regardless of whether I ignore it or not the facts remain, just like a disease it is present whether you acknowledge it or not, and eventually you will have to deal with it.

The problem is this, the Provisional Adoption Order was issued in the UK but is not considered to be valid outside of the UK. The Provisional Adoption Order was only a provisional step in the adoption process, therefore it could be considered that the name change was provisional to be finalised when the adoption order was granted in the country of the adopters. As this never happened in my case, does this mean that my name is fake? As I live outside of the UK and have had to verify my name with various officials though birth-certificates, passports etc. could I not therefore be considered to be using a fake ID as I was never legally adopted in any country?

I have found the answer to the problem of name, but from a Lawyer specialising in Family Law, they unfortunately know almost nothing about the Provisional Adoption Order, but from someone working in the British Foreign Office. The following is my summary of a lengthy conversation with them:

In the eyes of the British Government the identity and name of their citizens is fixed when a UK passport is issued. The facts given in the application process are checked and verified by the government department that issues passports. Once the issuing department is satisfied the passport is issued and in the eyes of the British Government the details on the passport is who you are. Any question of the validity of the details in the passport are answered by the issuing department. As parentage is not mentioned on your passport, it does not matter if the people mentioned on your birth certificate are your parents or not. You stand as an individual, separate from them, in your own right.

Which in my case means I have no legal parents given that my birth parents surrendered their rights as my legal parents and my intended adopters, by not completing the adoption process, did not become my legal parents. The name that I carry, the surname that my wife and children now carry is one that was issued to me by a miscarriage of justice but which is nevertheless verified by the British Government and is therefore a legal ID. I stand alone as the founder of my surname, with no parents or official family tree. Thanks to the stubborn non-action of my intended adopters whose decision was definitely more about their interests than my welfare, I have no past but thankfully I have the ability to shape the future of my family with a government backed ID.

If you have discovered that you are named in a Provisional Adoption Order, rest assured that if you have a passport issued by the British Government, the name given to you on those pages is yours and that it is a valid government backed document.

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!

 

How long does a Provisional Adoption Order last?

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In a recent telephone conversation with the General Records Office (GRO) I was told very clearly that the solution to my situation was to approach the authorities in the country that I was living in.  All that needed to happen was to convince the authorities to ‘formalise’ the Provisional Adoption Order (PAO) that had merely lain dormant since it had been issued.  This was the advice that the GRO expert had to give me and it seems to be very sensible and reasonable as well.

Having read that the PAO might in actual fact have a short legal lifespan I asked if this was actually true.  The answer was emphatic, once a PAO is given by the County Court they are active until they are formalised. This would of course be a fantastic option, but it is not quite true.

In my initial writing of this post in April 2014, I had read the article published in the ‘The Modern Law Review‘ Sept. 1959, Volume 22, Issue 5, on page 503.  In it the statement was made that As before the Act was passed, interim orders may be made for a maximum of two years, but now where the original interim order is for a lesser period, it may be extended to a maximum of two years in all.  I had read this to apply to the case of the PAO and in hindsight it is easy to see how you might link the word interim  and provisional, as they are very close in meaning.  In actual fact they are two very different and distinct types of processes and I made a honest mistake in confusing these two and I apologise for not double checking my facts.  The fact is that the PAO is not limited like interim adoptions to a two year period.

Does this mean that the GRO was correct?  While they were correct in saying that there was no legal restriction placed on the time frame inside of which a PAO could be enacted, there is another time frame for adoption in general.  The answer to the question ‘who can be adopted?’ is that to be eligible for adoption a child must be under the age of 18 years. A child who is married or has been married cannot be adopted.  In this framework as the last PAO was issued in the early 1970s, a child provisionally adopted would now be a minimum of 40 years old and so if they have not been formally adopted they would now be ineligible for adoption.