The Dossier

Once again, for any of you experiencing or experienced in international adoption, this blog will not be of great interest. However, for our friends and family, here’s the next step we had to complete after the homestudy: the dossier. A dossier is defined as a collection of papers containing detailed information about a particular person or subject, in this case, about Craig and me and our adoption. Dossier requirements vary slightly depending upon from which country you adopt, but here’s what we had to collect for ours:

1) Completed application to the Bulgarian Ministry of Justice (three original and signed versions of this same document were needed)
2) Power of attorney from us to our US agency
3) Power of attorney from us to our Bulgarian agency
4) I-797 C letter from USCIS (this means we filed form I-800A with the US government and they approved us for an international adoption from a Hague country)
5) Homestudy
6) Copy of the homestudy agency’s license
7) A recommendation letter from the homestudy agency
8) Medical certificates for each parent signed by a physician in front of a notary (this included a regular exam as well as HIV and tuberculosis tests – Craig enjoyed making the phone call in which he had to schedule HIV tests for his wife and himself)
9) Certified copy of our marriage certificate
10) Certificate of a Hague Accredited Child Placing Agency (our US agency)
11) A signed agreement for our Bulgarian agency
12) A financial form outlining our assets, liabilities, income, etc.
13) Photocopies of our passports
14) A privacy document
15) And a couple of photo pages showing us, our home, and our daily life

All of these documents had to be notarized and apostilled. An apostille is a certification from the Secretary of State's office verifying the authenticity of a document's notarization. In other words, it’s the Secretary of State affirming that we used a real, registered notary. Now in Ohio, between the notarization and the apostille, there’s a required little step called county certification in which your County Clerk of Courts gets to add his/her own stamp to certify that the notary we used is registered in the county he/she practices and that his/her commission has not expired. The only way to circumvent this intermediate step is to use a notary whose commission never expires and whose name is on file with the Secretary of State’s office. Even though we didn’t know this at first and caused ourselves some extra work and expenses, we were lucky to have a friend who is a lawyer and notary who not only notarized everything for us for free (Thanks, Whitney!), but whose notary stamp allowed us to skip the county certification and go straight to the apostille for many of the documents once we had figured out the system.