You could find school papers on my oldest son when he was little where we listed his name with his stepdad’s surname even though he was never adopted by him. My son wanted to use our name so we let him. There were never any problems and eventually he returned to his legal last name.
I am not going to make a great effort to hunt up the evidence because it is not an aspect of this puzzle that intrigues me much, but I will tell you what I remember having read.
1. First, there is that one school record where his name is written "Barry Soetoro." I have repeatedly read that only Indonesian citizens were permitted to go to Indonesian schools.
2. I have read that under Indonesian law, a child is automatically adopted when a man marries the mother, if the child is less than five years of age.
3. On one of Stanley Ann's passport renewal forms, she lists her son's name as Barry SoeBarKah (or some such) According to blogger "Lame Cherry", in the Indonesian language, the name "means literally Who is this, but the son of Soetoro." Signifying that the Indonesians considered him adopted. (Here is a link.)
http://lamecherry.blogspot.com/2011/05/soebarkah.html
4. I further recall reading that his sister Maya Soetoro Ng has made a comment that implied he was adopted by her father, Lolo.
5. Maya said: "you were suggesting that because my father, his stepfather, had adopted him, that my brother was no longer American..."
6. The Dunham/Soetoro divorce decree says: "“The parties have 1 children below age 18 and 1 chidren above 18 but still dependent on the parties for education." implying that Barry is also legally Lolo Soetoro's child.
That is what I remember. Now what can you put on the opposite scale to balance that information? Is there proof he wasn't adopted by Lolo Soetoro?
When I was a tiny person, my mother divorced my father and when I was about two, she married this other guy. By the time I went to school I had no knowledge that he was not my real father.
Early on in second grade I was pulled into the school office and informed that I was using the wrong name. I had NO IDEA what in hell they meant. So, the lady bluntly told me that the man my mother was married to, whose last name I had thought to be my own, was NOT my father, but was a step-father that had not adopted me.
I still remember that clearly - it is one of the very few clear memories that I have from my childhood.
I mostly remember the flood of joy - because my step father was a monstrous bastard and I hated him by that time.
Anyway, she told me my true last name. My mother had never even hinted about this to me, so I was stunned.
But you see, this was in the mid-sixties. I was not adopted by this wretch, and had been using the last name when I should not have been.
I lived in a tiny, very rural area of Virginia. I went to a school that had seven rooms for grades one through twelve.
Yet they discovered that I was using the wrong last name and that I had been fraudulently registered.
Just saying.