Official Documents Useful in Adoption Tracing

The two documents which are normally the most useful are:

1. Birth certificate
2. Background of the Child to be Adopted

Sometimes, you may have other documents such as a copy of an ID card, a house registration, or something else. You should send us all that you have, because there may be information that you do not see relevant but which we do see as potentially significant.

For all documents, the Thai version is more important than the English version, but it is best to send both.

Practically all official records and official matters in Thailand are indexed and handled in Thai, not in English. There may be an English version, but the officials go by the Thai version, and the English version is mainly an aside just so you can read it and foreign governments and private sector entities can handle it on their end. On the Thai side, it's the Thai spelling that matters.

As noted elsewhere on this website regarding finding the records and location of a Thai person in Thailand, we can do this practically 100% only if we have a copy of their name in Thai, not A-z. If we are given a name only in A-z, and if our source had no Thai document, then we must first transliterate it into Thai. It is clear how to transliterate in about 70% of cases, but about 20% of cases require considerable guessing and a lot of variations, and another 10% are difficult.

For adoption tracing, we have no problems with names given to us in Thai, but if you have only the romanized A-z version and not the Thai version then it may or may not be a problem. It depends on whether it is obvious how to transliterate the name from A-z to Thai. Most Thai names have a clear meaning. Many don't, or could have multiple meanings by the way they are spelled in A-z. We also get some awful transliterations into A-z.

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