- 6/5/2007 10:32:06 AMWhat is apostilling?You may have heard about a dossier by watching James Bond but perhaps you have never realized what is in one or what it takes to get one. If you want to adopt a baby or child in an international adoption, you will soon find out that you need one.
A dossier is a collection of documents about yourself. In our case, it is a list of documents required by the Russian authority. Generally speaking, the dossier will contain the following types of things:
- A medical history and review by your doctor
- Financial information of all the places you do business with (your employer, your bank or credit union...)
- All the adoption agency petition application forms
- Post placement information agreement forms signed by you
- Certified copies of marriage and birth certificates
Once all of these documents are signed and notarized, they need to be apostilled. This is a verification process by the state authority to determine if the notaries signature is valid. This is required because method of authentication of the country where the adoption is taking place.
In a nutshell, the Russian government requires us to prove that our method of authenticating a signature is valid. For us it means paying $10 for each document to be verified. Our current estimates bring us to around 70 documents. 70 x $10 = $700. OUCH!
