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If Debbie has no luck in finding a birth certificate then unless he wants to go down the DNA route some lateral thinking will have to come into play.
The idea of older relatives if he knows any would be useful to see what they know, maybe just an address he was living at as a small child could help. I'm thinking electoral rolls to see who was living there.
Add At the moment Ancestry has DNA tests on offer until 27/3/19If you go down to the woods today you better not go alone.0 -
Where you born overseas?
No - UK
All the adoption support sites and genealogy sites I’ve ever read agree that you are not issued with a new BIRTH certificate after you are adopted. The only links that suggest this are to other countries.
I’d be interested in a link to an official UK site which says that adoptees are issued with a birth certificate with their adopted parents details on it - rather than an adoption certificate which might look similar to a short form birth certificate on its face and not have any reference to adoption on it, but is not an extract from the birth register but from the adopted persons register.
This is an issue which can cause adopted people significant distress in the forums I’ve read over the last few years, and as this thread may well pop up on an internet search from those wanting. Birth certificate in their new name, it would be good to ensure that the correct info with supporting links ends up here.
And in respect of the OP, searching the birth register will not result in finding an adoption certificate if the father in law was adopted. She’d need to be searching the adopted persons register to find this. There is no record for me, under my adopted name on the birth register when I’ve previously searched for this.0 -
Google tells me that the only circumstances in which an amended birth certificate is issued is where a birth is legitimised by the subsequent marriage of the birth parents. Adoptees are not otherwise issued with a new birth certificate in the new name - it’s always just the adoption certificate which stands in its place but as it doesn’t say on its face that it is an adoption certificate, that may explain the confusion.
That relates to the re-registration of births, which can be for a number of specific reasons, but none apply in the case of adoption which has its own special procedures.
When an adoption takes place, the court notifies GRO and a record is created in the Adopted Children Register. A certificate is issued from that entry - it will show the child's (new) name and the names of the adoptive parents. The full certificate does state it is from the Adoption Register.
A short birth certificate just showing the child's new name and date of birth is also issued (which makes no reference to the adoption).
An instruction is also sent to the Superintendent Registrar in the district where the original birth took place - the word "adopted" is added in the margin of the entry and it is signed by the Supt registrar. No reference is made to the new name of the child.0 -
All correct Tony MM except that the short form certificate you get after you’ve been adopted isn’t a “birth” certificate. A short form birth certificate is an extract from the Register of births - this is an extract from the Adopted Persons Register.
You may not be able to tell the difference by looking at the two documents but OP wants to search the main register to find details about her father in law and if he was adopted she’s not going to find those (in his new name) on the Register of Births. She’ll need instead to search the Adopted Perspns Register
And these days, few places will accept a short form certificate anyway so now the choices are to provide a long form birth certificate in your birth name or a long form adoption certificate in the new name which states clearly you have been adopted so the two short form documents looking similar to avoid embarrassment is becoming obsolete...0 -
Maybe some fake names would make all this clearer
OP has always known the Fil as Humphrey Bogart born 1 April 1970. But Humphrey was actually born as Engelbert Humperdinck on that date.
OP will not find any trace of Humphrey on the birth register for 1 April 1970. If she were to check all the births registered on that day in the correct area, she may find Engelbert and there will be a notation next to Engelbert’s name to say he was adopted. But there will be nothing on the birth register which links Humphrey and Engelbert.
She could alternatively search the Adoption register for Humphrey. If she finds a hit she can then cross check that the adoptive parents are the people she believed to be Humphrey’s parents. But the adoption register also won’t link back to Engelbert’s birth certificate - so if she’s looking for a bloodline for medical rather than genealogical reasons, she will have hit a dead end unless she goes down the DNA route. If the FIL wants to find out that he was Engelbert previously, as he was adopted pre 1975 he needs to have the mandatory counselling before he will be told.
The fact that Humphrey had a short form certificate in the name of Humphrey doesn’t help the OP in any way in her research and has been a red herring right from the start0 -
It’s probably also worth Katie considering the potential outcome of your researches and how “desperate” it is for your husband to solve this mystery.
To become a “late discovery adoptee” is pretty traumatic and will affect more people than just your father in law emotionally if this is what has happened. You should consider whether morally you need his consent to pursue this at all, and what you might do with the info if it turns out he was adopted. If the matter is desperate due to needing to understand or interpret health risks that’s clearly different to a family history project but just putting it out there to be factored in.0 -
Following on from Nikki's latest post on this thread there is a strong possibility that the OP's FIL doesn't want the information to be known or found out.
He's still alive, there are likely to have been times throughout his life when he would have needed a BC or to declare his father's name (when getting married?), he will be just as able as his siblings to provide information about his father. But he's saying 'I know nothing'.
Unless the FIL himself is the one who desperately wants to know about his father's detsils, it might be a good idea to step back a bit.What would Buzz do?
I used to be Snow White - but I drifted.0
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