Why was my aunt Pat adopted by her birth mother?
QI am deep into my research, and I have come up against a puzzle that I wonder if you can help with. My paternal aunt made no secret of the fact that my grandfather had adopted her, and that she was apparently my grandmother’s natural daughter. However, having asked my cousin to send me her mother’s birth certificate, she sent over the adoption certificate too, which shows my aunt’s ‘adoptive parents’ as both my grandfather and grandmother. Surely my grandmother wouldn’t appear on this document if she was her natural mother? The certificate is dated 1937. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Nikki Kulin
AThe answers to questions like this can usually be found by referring to the relevant legislation.
The 1926 Adoption of
Children Act was the first to introduce a framework for legal adoption in England and
Wales. Clause 3(a) of the Act emphasised that: “The Court before making an adoption order shall be satisfied… that every person whose consent is necessary under this Act… has consented to and understands the nature and effect of the adoption order for which application is made, and in particular in the case of any parent understands that the effect of the adoption order will be permanently to deprive him or her of his or her parental rights.” This meant that the legal relationship between the birth mother and the child ended as soon as the child was adopted.
In most cases, this was a straightforward process and all contact between mother and child ceased at this point.
However, in a case like your aunt’s, the legislation introduced a significant complication, because her birth mother was also her adoptive mother. The only way that the stepfather could adopt the child was to adopt her jointly with his wife, meaning that the birth mother, effectively, was required to adopt her own child. This anomaly wasn’t removed until 2002, under the terms of the Adoption and Children Act.
Another piece of legislation, also introduced in 1926, allowed for the re-registration, under certain circumstances, of the births of illegitimate children whose parents were now married. This was only possible if the father was the natural father of the child, and if he and the mother would have been free to marry at the time of the child’s birth – ie neither of them had been married to someone else.
However, in this case re-registration wasn’t an option, because William was not your aunt’s natural father. It’s interesting to note that her original birth record is indexed under the surnames Anderson and Hartin, suggesting that her birth father’s name is recorded on the certificate.
David Annal