AnthonyMMM and Andy J2022 - if I understand you correctly then the "adopted" note could only have been added after 1927 when the adoption act came into force, and I know it was before 1930 because John Brich who signed it ceased to be registrar then. I wonder, and I guess we can only ever wonder, if there was an informal adoption in the early 1920s and then the new "parents" used the adoption act after 1927 to give Florence (maybe under a new name) some legal rights. Was this something that commonly happened after the 1927 act was introduced?
Once again Antony is the best person to answer this. But I am sure that courts probably did, in some rare cases, formalise adoptions prior to 1926, but use of adoption orders per se was only brought into being by section 1 of the
Adoption of Children Act 1926. However prior to 1926 the GRO had no remit (or procedure) to register adoptions or court orders so it is less likely that such things would have been recorded before 1926 other than in the court records, not all of which survive. The 1926 Act was instrumental in setting up the Adopted Children Register as it was then named (see section 11 of the Act).
It is definitely the case that adoptions which had occurred prior to 1926 could be formalised with an Adoption Order some time later, because section 10 of the Act provided for this. Furthermore if the child had been with the adoptive parents for more than 2 years at the point when the Order was applied for, it was not necessary to have the consent of the birth parent, guardian or other person who previously had care of the child prior to the informal adoption.
The Adoption of Children Act 1926 is not long and is fairly easy to read, so well worth reading in full to see how ground breaking it was. You should bear in mind that it was part of a wider initiative by Parliament to regularise illegitimacy and the problems this caused over inheritances. The second piece of legislation towards this aim was the
Legitimacy Act 1926.
