Visit the Oregon Kinship Navigator, a statewide resource and referral service for grandparents raising grandchildren and other relative caregivers.
Among other resources you will find this one:
Legal Guide For Grandparents and Other Relatives Raising Children in Oregon, 2020 (use the webpage’s link for a PDF of the Guide).
Please also read previous blog posts on this topic, especially this one: Grandparent Visitation Rights in Oregon
There are lots of free legal forms online and in print, but none of them will be the exact forms you need in your specific case. You can lose a lot of time and money if you file the wrong forms.
Courts are very, very careful when it comes to child custody legal matters. Oregon courts do not have official or fill-in-the-blank child custody legal forms for parents, grandparents, or for any third party seeking child custody. You need to draft your own forms specific to your legal situation.
A Law dot com news feed article: “Skadden Associate, Herself a Rape Victim, Dives into Akin Fray,” by Brian Baxter, Am Law Daily, 8/22/12, got me wondering about Oregon’s law:
“…. Prewitt says that 31 states have not yet adopted special laws that restrict the ability of rapists to assert their custodian and visitation rights to a child born through rape. The other 19 states—Delaware, Oregon, and Pennsylvania have added protections since the publication of Prewitt’s law review article in 2010—have laws that restrict the access of rapists to the children they fathered….” [Link to full Law dot com article.]
If you search the ORS (Oregon Revised Statutes) Index, under Sex Offenses-Rape, you will be referred to these sections, which today read as follows, but please, talk to an attorney if you need legal advice!
The “Resource Guide for Grandparents and Other Relatives Raising Children” has a 2012 update.
To obtain a copy of the “Legal Guide for Grandparents and Other Relatives Raising Children,” please contact AARP Oregon toll-free at (866) 554-5360, or download from the OSU Extension Service Family and Community Health website. (You can also search for it by title using a search engine of choice.)
A recent story in the Oregonian, March 29th, 2007, headline, “Raising Grandkids,” by Abby Haight ((available through the public library’s Oregonian database and on the Oregonlive web page for 14 days after publication), has moved me to post some of the resources we point grandparents to when they come to the law library with their own grandkid-raising questions. (We probably get these questions every few weeks.)
Here are some Portland metro area and beyond sources of information:
1) Report: “Oregon’s Legal Guide for Grandparents and other Relatives Raising Children,” 2005.
2) County Government office: Your county’s Aging and Disabilities Services office
Oregon Legal Research Blog