Legal Question in Family Law in Massachusetts
I'm not sure where to begin. I'm asking on behalf of my parents. I have a 4 year old niece, the daughter of my sister, who passed away 3 years ago when the child was one year old. We were promised by her father that we would always be a part of her life. About a year ago, he remarried and our visitation with my niece was cut drastically from every weekend to maybe 4 hours a month if we are lucky. We've pleaded with him for more timewith her and he swears he is not trying to cut her out of our lives, but his actions say otherwise. We've tried taling to him and he promised us overnight visits during her school vacations and that turned out to be another lie. We no longer get her overnight AT ALL anymore. Sometimes we will go over two months without seeing her, he never calls us, cancels scheduled visits all the time and is pretty much forcing a new family upon her to replace us. I understand the child needs a mopther figure, but what is wrong with her seeing her grandparents?! My biece sees his wife's parents more than she sees me or her real grandparents. We think this is completely inhuman and we're fed up with being lied to and watching all that we have left of my sister be taken away from us. We don't think one weekend a month is unreasonable and we're willing to do anything to spend more time with her, but we have no idea what our rights are, if any. We didn't want to have to get the law involved, but we feel we've run out of options. Please, if you can point us in any direction, please please help! We love that little girl more than anything in the world and would like to spend time with her while she's still young and actually wants to hang around us! We've got to have some rights, don't we? maybe we should have sought legal council when my sister passed, but we believed that her fiancee was a decent enough person to always give my niece a place in our lives. For the last year, year and a half, though, he has proven himself to be not a man of his word at all!
1 Answer from Attorneys
I am sorry to hear about your situation. Fortunately you can file a complaint for visitation. The court has previously ruled that family members that have a history of a relationship with a minor can petition for visitation with the minor. In many situations the filing of the complaint is enough to make the other party agree to visitation. For additional information contact my office.
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