Adoption

The adoption regulations for the Baltic provinces of the Russia Empire were set in special Laws for the Baltic provinces and are described here following the book /Svod Baltics/. It may happen that the appropriate rules for Russia proper that were in force in Latgale region were different, at this moment I have no detailed information, but I hope the differences should be not very great.

A person who possessed all legal rights was allowed to adopt children of other people. It follows that the adopter was to be of the lawful age (21 year). The people of both genders were allowed to adopt though in general women had less legal rights. The adoptive parents had to be older than adoptees for not less than 18 years. As these were the only two restrictions to the age both of adopters and of adoptees, the individuals of adult age could be also adopted.

If somebody already had his/her own child(ren) or adoptive child(ren), then an additional adoption was possible on the grounds which the appropriate court found important. Additionally, the agreement of existing children and/or adoptees was needed. To be exact, in this case the agreement of all descendants was needed for the adoption, according to the Law. Similarly, the agreement of the appropriate court was needed, if somebody wished to adopt several children at once. The court had to decide if there would have been reasons to allow this adoption. The Law said nothing that the agreement of the other spouse was necessary, if a married person decided to adopt, and it was not said that only married people could be adopters.

Another important regulation was that the agreement of the adoptee was needed to make the adoption legally forcible. If the adoptee was under parental power - was under lawful age and had living parents, then the agreement of parents was needed. In case that the adoptee had no parents, then the guardians or the appropriate orphans court had to agree. When the adoptee later reached the lawful age, he/she had the right to disaffirm the adoption.

The biological parents of an adoptee lost their parental power after the adoption, but the adoption did not cancel the rights of the adoptee in the previous family (if known), though new rights of the adoptee in the new family were acquired. At the same time, the adoptee was charged with new obligations to the new parents but to the new parents only, not to the other members of the new family.

As it was said in the Law, the adoption started at the moment when the adopter applied for the adoption at the civil court that had legal force upon the adoptee. This court was different for different estates. Principally the adoptions of urban residents were considered in an orphan court, but the decisions for adoption of peasant children were made in the appropriate pagasts court. The primary information on adoptions should be searched for in the archives of these courts. As no rules existed for privacy of the adoption fact, one may hope to find the biological parents of an adopted ancestor relatively easy.

The adoptee acquired the family name of the new family. If the child was adopted in a nobility family, he/she could acquire this new name only by the Highest agreement i.e. the Tzar allowed (or not allowed) the naming of the adoptee by the noble family name. Usually it was obligatory that the child was born in another noble family.

The Law of the Empire also defined another legal status of children in the families that was different from the status of adopted child. I think it could be translated – the foster children, in Russian it sounds prijemyši. The foster children had no legal rights of children of the families they lived in. It was allowed to terminate the care of foster children in any time. The demand to reimburse the expenses for care of these children could be risen only in the case of – as it was said in the Law - evident ingratitude of the child, but no definition of evident ingratitude was given.

No doubt that foster children existed in reality, but I do not know how important it was to register the foster children, may be in most cases the foster children lived in families without any legal decisions, though the standard registration in the locality was obligatory for them too, of course. See about this registration in the Bureaucracy Page.

I have seen many publications about adoptions in the newspapers that informed about the appropriate decisions of state and court institutions, but I do not know if such publications were obligatory in all cases of adoption, and I am not sure that this practice was always followed. In any case, the adoption was not kept in secret.

Only in 1937 the new Civil Code of the country was adopted, and the new adoption regulations came in force. Just for your information: these regulations with minor changes are legal in modern Latvia since September 1, 1993.

The new adoption regulations were more exactly defined and many changes were also made. The adopter was to be at least 25 years old (not 21 as previously). In the exceptional case, when the adopter adopted his own illegitimate child, he could be younger than 25, and then the obligatory age difference in 18 years had not to be obeyed. Now the agreement of the adoptee was needed in case, if he/she was 12 or older.

It was set forth that the adoption of an adult person was allowed only in cases where the relations of parents/children existed in reality for a sufficiently long time. The Law also defined for this case the legal relations between the other children of the adopter from one side and the adoptee and his/her eventual children from other side.

The adoptee acquired the family name of the adopter. His/her first name could be changed only in serious cases. The births registers could be changed, and adoptive parents could be registered in. The adoption fact now was private and nobody could reveal this information without permission of adopters. It was also true concerning the children (babies) who were adopted in the age before 12 and were not informed about the adoption, therefore they had no possibility of canceling the adoption when they reached the lawful age, which was possible in the Russia Empire.

The adoption legislation of the USSR was not principally different to the Russia Empire and Latvia standards. Now the fact of adoption was strictly private. Nobody, except the adopters, had rights to inform anybody that a child of a particular family was in reality adopted. The Criminal Code comprised a special paragraph for the prosecution of people who revealed the adoption secret. It is important to researchers to know that for privacy reasons it was allowed not only to change the family name of the adoptee, that would be quite normal, but also the given name and the ethnicity. The ethnicity of a person was mentioned in the USSR documents, you know.

The adoptee was also not obligatory informed about the adoption, except the cases if the child was older than 12, then its agreement was needed.