Have no fear; a stepparent adoption can still be performed even if you cannot locate the non-custodial parent. While the process is a little lengthier, and can cost a bit more to complete without the consent of the non-custodial parent, there are still ways to complete your stepparent adoption.

You will have to prove to the court that you have gone above and beyond in your efforts to locate the missing parent. Contacting family members (of the non-custodial parent), old mutual friends, asking the post office for a forwarding address if you have an old address of the non-custodial parent, as well as trying websites such as anywho.com, myspace.com, or intelius.com. All of these websites are free of charge, and can be very helpful when searching for a missing parent. Another great website to try is classmates.com, there is a fee to become a member of the site in order to get full information on other members, but it is a small fee and good for one year of unlimited access to the site and its members.

Once you have shown the court that you have tried every avenue to locate the non-custodial parent, and have still come up empty handed, your lawyer will most likely file a petition to the court to allow a public notice to be published in a local paper. Some states require the notice to be published in the state that the child resides in, while others insist that the notice be published in the state of the non-custodial parents last known address. Publishing a public notice of intent to terminate parental rights and have the child adopted by his or her stepparent is a fairly common occurrence these days, and the notice is usually sent off to the publisher to be printed in an upcoming edition within days of the lawyer petitioning the court.

Public notices can be costly, several hundred dollars in not uncommon. Most newspapers accept only cash or a check, so be sure to begin saving money ahead of time as the paper will not publish the notice until the bill is paid in full!

The price of the notice varies greatly. It will depend on how long the notice is, and quite frankly they do tend to be fairly lengthy since they not only explain the situation in brief, but are written in long-winded legal mumbo jumbo as well which takes up quite a bit of space, and space is excatly what you are paying for. Another factor that is considered into the price of the public notice is how long the notice will run, as well as how many editions it will be running in. Some papers only run once a week, while others run daily. If you are publishing your notice in a paper that runs daily the price will be a little higher than in a paper that runs weekly. Ask your lawyer if you can pick which paper the notice is to run in, as putting it in a weekly paper can save you a little cash.

Most lawyers have one or two local papers in which they work with on a regular basis. They should be able to give you a ball park estimate as to how large of a dent your public notice is going to put into your wallet.

The notice will usually run about thirty days. Once those thirty days are up, the court will allow another week or two for the non-custodial parent to respond to the notice. If the court does not get a response of any kind from the non-custodial parent either during the run of the notice, or in the allotted time frame after the notice has run, the court will take the lack of response and action as the non-custodial parent consenting to the stepparent adoption, and the petition to adopt will move forward.

While the process can move much slower when you do not have the initial consent of the non-custodial parent, and you have a few more hoops to jump through, a stepparent adoption can still be completed if the whereabouts of the non-custodial parent are unknown. I was worried that my adopted stepson would be embarrassed about the public notice that we had to publish, yet to my surprise and delight he would come home once a week gleaming, with a paper in his hand that he had gotten from one of his teachers in school.

Each week he would burst through the front door after school waving the newspaper exclaiming how many more weeks we had left, and then we would sit down and find the notice together. Even though it said the exact same thing in each paper, he would sit down and read it word for word every week. Once he was finished he would tell me how he showed it to all of his teachers in school, and how excited they were for him. Instead of feeling ashamed about having the fact that his birthmother abandoned him written in the paper, he gleamed with pride over the fact that someone was adopting him, that he was wanted, and very soon would be a part of a complete family for the first time in his life!

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