ALDRIDGE FAMILY GRANDCHILDREN ADOPTION
My name is Martyn Aldridge. I was born in Kent, England. My wife Celeste was born in New York and we live in Shohola, Pennsylvania, USA.
My son Ricky passed away from heart failure in February 2012, he was 29 years old and was married to his wife Lillian. They had 3 young children Thomas 7, Connie 6 and Jakob 3 and were living in the North of Scotland. The children are now all a year older.
Just before Ricky passed away the 3 children were taken into Foster care as Lillian found it difficult to look after the children. The children are still in Foster care as of April 2013. Thomas and Jakob are together but Connie lives with a seperate foster carer over 2 hours away. They see each other 1 day a month.
The Social Services decided that the children should not return to their mother and we stepped forward to adopt the children. Lillian gave us as her first and only choice of keeping them together within the family. We have been communicating with the Social Services for over a year now with a view to adopting these 3 wonderful children and have tried to keep in touch with the children as much as possible, but as they are under the care of the Social Services it is not easy, apart from the fact they are 3000 miles away. we visited them twice last year but have not been able to go over since May 2012.
We were advised that the UK would pay for many of the adoption fees, including legal fees but it seems that this is not going to be the case. It appears that UK to USA adoptions are very rare, only 10 in the last 5 years. Most of these are from England and Wales, which have a slightly different legal system from Scotland. These children are in Scotland where I don't know if this has ever been done before. This has also created the problem of the Social Services not having any experience of the proceedure and the legal system is not geared to support this either. There are no solicitors in Scotland speacializing in this field of Inter Country Adoption so we will have to secure a solicitor from England.
We are needing to raise money for these legal fees to secure the Intercountry Adoption, air fare's back and forth, other travelling expenses and to extend our home to make it possible to accomodate the children. At present we have 2 very small bedrooms and the adoption will not proceed without the extra accomodation. We have blueprints drawn and a willing work force. I am a contractor by trade and am capable of doing much of the building work myself, but time and money are at a premium and I cannot run my business to keep us going and spend time building the accomodation needed at the same time. We do have many volunteers who will provide some free labor, but the materials still need to be paid for.
We are the only option within our family to keep these children together. We do have limited time to make this happen now as it is being considered by the social services whether to put the children up for general adoption and who knows if and when we will ever see them again.
These are very difficult times for us and our family. We would appreciate any help that you can give, even if it is just spreading the word around.
I am very happy to answer any questions you may have.
God Bless your for reading this and thank you in advance for any support you can give.......
Here is a song called 'Wild Pony' that my wife Celeste wrote for Thomas : http://www.reverbnation.com/celestealdridge Click on the 3rd link down. If you would like a free download or copy, please let us know
Sincerely.
Martyn & Celeste Aldridge
