Shawn was ready for a fresh start for his family. He and his wife were raising their children together, including Shawn’s son, DJ, from a previous relationship.

They had been to West Virginia and thought it would be a good place to make a life for the family as a whole. While Shawn worked on getting a job, they applied for benefits to get health coverage for the family set up in West Virginia, but there was a problem.

Shawn’s son, DJ, didn’t have a birth certificate.

When DJ was born, his birth mother didn’t finish paperwork for him. She never got copies of his birth certificate or social security card. When Shawn got full custody of DJ a year later, he found out his son did not have any official identification.

Shawn spent years trying to fix the problem on his own.

“I was getting sent around in circles. I was working on this by myself for four years,” he says. “I forget who introduced me to Legal Aid of WV, but they blessed me.”

Shawn applied and was assigned an attorney from Legal Aid of WV (LAWV), who got to work on the process right away. It was complicated, but the attorney and his paralegal slowly made progress getting DJ’s documents from his birth state of Tennessee.

“It was so stressful,” Shawn says. “I was getting worried due to the fact that my son is getting older with no birth certificate or social. I was going to bed wondering if we had to go to the hospital if they would reject helping him because he didn’t have any records or insurance or anything.”

After about a year of back-and-forth with various offices in Tennessee, LAWV got a birth certificate for DJ. He also got a social security number and card, and Shawn got him health coverage and added to their housing paperwork and set up in school.

“Four years of the same thing over and over and you not getting what you need—it tends to make you on the angrier side instead of the patient side. My attorney took that off my shoulders and helped me a lot.”

Now, Shawn has a new job and his family is getting established in West Virginia. He doesn’t have to worry about whether DJ will miss out on opportunities because he doesn’t have the right paperwork.

“I’ll never forget what my attorney told me. He said it’s crazy that a man that wants to be a father and is doing everything he can but can’t get any help with his son’s documents,” Shawn says. “He told me step by step how it was going to go, and it did. Now my son has an official name, health benefits, and he can go to school. I’m so thankful.”