Compiling an Adoption Dossier for El Salvador – with Checklist

Compiling a dossier for an international adoption takes a lot of time, a lot of attention to detail, and a lot of patience (especially since several of the items involve waiting on government entities).

A new friend of mine has hit just this stage.  It seems overwhelming at first.  There’s a long list, and the very first item is a homestudy report which comes with a separate but similar checklist all its own.  And then every document must be notarized, authenticated by the county in which that notary holds her/his license, and then apostilled by the state in which that county is located.  So some people are looking at a whole bunch of notaries, multiple counties, and several states in order to compile their one family dossier.

Here’s my method of keeping the madness to a minimum.  As soon as I got the lists for both our Homestudy and our Dossier, I created tables in Word that would allow me to track each document and also mark off each level of progress for each document.  The checklists served both a practical and psychological purpose for me.  The practical:  there are a lot of documents to collect, and they each need to have every seal on them!  But secondarily, I felt like I was accomplishing something.  Even if I had merely obtained a document, I put a little clip-art check-mark in the box in that column.  Somehow, watching the check-marks’ multiply made me feel better, even during the early stages when I knew I had months to go until our whole dossier was complete.

With the two lists side-by-side, I highlighted which items overlapped, so I could collect copies for both lists at one time as much as possible.  Having been through an adoption once before, I was ready to ferret out any efficiencies I could.  And this dossier compilation still took me about 10 months.  Again, patience is key!

So here it is – the Dossier Checklist for our El Salvador Adoption.  I’ll post the Homestudy Checklist in a separate post.  Hope these are helpful to someone out there! 

[Note: Please refer to your own agency's list of requirements when compiling your own dossier.  We reside in Maryland and are adopting from El Salvador.  While most items should carry through for all Salvadoran adoptions, requirements do vary from country to country and even vary slightly from one agency to another.]

Dossier Docs Checklist – El Salvador