Adoption document apostille

What these documents are

A dossier for a Hague Convention adoption (Colombia, the Philippines, Bulgaria, India, South Korea, and others) typically includes:

• Vital records: birth certificates for each parent, marriage certificate, any divorce decrees. Certified copies.
• Home study: prepared by a licensed agency, signed by the social worker, notarized.
• Clearances: FBI background checks (federal), state police clearances, child abuse registry clearances (state).
• Medical letters: from each parent's physician, notarized.
• Financial documents: employment letters, bank letters, tax returns or IRS transcripts, notarized or certified.
• References: personal reference letters, notarized.
• USCIS approval: the I-800A approval notice, which is a federal document.
• Passport copies, photos, and a commitment or motivation letter, notarized.

Do they need notarization first?

Mixed. Vital records and state clearances are certified by the issuing office and must not be notarized. Everything written by a private person or organization (home study, medical letters, references, employment letters, the motivation letter) must be signed before a notary. The agency checklist usually says which; if it does not, we do.

State or federal?

Both. Each state-issued or state-notarized document goes to its own Secretary of State. FBI clearances and the USCIS approval go to the US Department of State. A single dossier commonly touches three or four offices.

What you need to provide

• Your agency's dossier checklist, which we treat as the spec.
• Certified copies of vital records, ordered fresh.
• Notarized originals of everything else, with complete notary blocks.
• Your agency's target filing date, so we sequence expiring documents correctly.

What happens

1. Quote request with the checklist and the destination country. We map every document to its office and quote the dossier as one total.
2. We tell you the order to gather and notarize things in, so perishable documents are done last.
3. You mail the set (or sets, if we stage it), tracked.
4. We submit to each office in parallel, track all of them, and return the complete dossier in one package, or ship it straight to your agency.

Common mistakes

• Getting clearances apostilled first, then having them expire while the rest of the dossier is assembled.
• A home study notarized on the wrong page or with the social worker's signature but no notary block.
• Sending the FBI clearance to a state.
• Missing a document the country requires but the agency's generic checklist did not list. We keep country-specific notes and flag these.
• Translation timing. Many countries require certified translation of the apostilled dossier. Translation happens after the apostille, not before, and it takes time; plan for it.

How to start

Request a quote and attach or describe the agency checklist, the destination country, and your target filing date. We come back with a document-by-document plan and one total.

Price: quoted as a package. Three documents from one state are $549; full dossiers are priced on the document count and the number of offices involved, and are always less than the per-document rate.

Background reading: our affiliated company's guide.