Recent UK marriages – no official certificate copies available:

[britam 0]

Firstly – thank you to everyone on this site and others whose advice we have relied on throughout our application for an immigrant visa through the London embassy.

Here's one thing that we couldn't find mention of anywhere else and which we ran into.

The US embassy says that they do not accept marriage certificates signed by vicars, etc. They only accept certified copies from the General Record Office. We were married in a small parish in England. The records from such parishes should be sent to the General Record office every three months. This had indeed happened in our case but the General Record Office is 18 months behind on adding records to the computer system and will not issue a copy of the certificate until then.

In the end, we managed to get passed from the General Record Office helpline to the actual office that deals with marriages. They wouldn’t put our record to the front of the queue. In fact, they weren’t in a position to view our record. Instead, they contacted the church warden in the church and had them fax over a copy of the entry in the church’s register. Once they were satisfied that the marriage was real they sent us a letter stating that it was a real marriage and explaining that there was no way of issuing a certificate copy for 18 months. The embassy accepted this, in addition to the marriage certificate, as evidence that there was a public record of the marriage.

Easy enough when you know the answer but daunting when you are starting from scratch!

[SirJon 0]

The copy of the Marriage Certificate would more than likely be the same as the one that you received when you were married, as religious celebrants are entitled to solomnise marriages, and the certificate you would recieve would be a scan of the original record as signed by the vicar.

It may have been quicker for you to have contacted the District Registry Office where you first filed for your intent to marry and returned the signed schedule of marriage. They would have been able to issue you with a certificate.