11 July 04
Marriage Docs for France
Tapping back to my previous post about all the things I have Been Doin’ Lately, here’s a bit more about one of the scenarios, the legal documents I need to move to France.
Depending on why one is going, there are different hoops you must jump through. In my case, the reason is marriage, and the hoops for an American going to France to get married and stay are seemingly quite few, which is quite the contrary to all the horror stories I’ve heard and read about over the last several years for foriegn nationals trying to get into the U.S. (Since “9-11,” I can only imagine things have got a lot worse for international couples trying to bring it home to the…cough...promise land.)
Apparently, all I need to do is put together a few documents requested by the Consulat and bring them with me on the plane. Of course I’m simplifying a bit because variables can be different depending on where you intend to marry, but now that I’ve got everything together, it was pretty painless in retrospect. According to the Marie (City Hall) in Strasbourg, the base documents I needed were my passport, birth certificate, an Affidavit of Law, and a Certificate of Health. Each document had to be officially prepared, notarized, translated, and/or include an Apostille.
I had the passport already, with plenty of valid time left on it, so that was an easy check-off. I had my original birth certificate, but it didn’t count. What you have to do is write the Bureau of Vital Statistics in the state you were born and request a new one because you need one that has been notarized within the three months you intend to use it. Whe requesting a new birth certificate, you also need to indicate for which country it’s intended and that an Apostille be attached to it. From requesting it to receiving it in the mail, it took a little under 3 weeks, not bad.
An Affidavit of Law (AoL) is simply a notarized statement that you make in person to an attorney indicating you are legally able to marry, are not currently married, etc. The attorney witnesses it by hearing you, and notarizes it by typing it up all legal-like. The attorney must be registered with proper authorities to provided such a document. According to the Web site of the French Embassy in San Francisco, this means an attorney who is registered with the French Embassy in your jurisdiction of the U.S. For me that was the one in San Francisco. You go to their Web site and find a list of attornies that are registered. The list will give the location of their offices and contact info. There were two attorneys in Seattle, right downtown. Perfect for me. I picked the one with the French name.
Like the birth certificate, the AoL must be affixed with an Apostille for France (or for whatever country it’s intened). To get the Apostille, you need to send the document to the Secretary of State. My chosen attorney assisted me with this by forwarding the AoL directly to the Secretary of State’s office (after I paid her, of course), which ultimately faciliated the transfer of the AoL back to me. (By the way, the Apostille for the birth certificate also has to be forwarded to the respective Secreatry of State’s office in the state where you were born.)
The Certificate of Health (CoH) is obtained by first having a medical exam. Similar to the situation for an attorney, you need to involve a physician who is registered with the French Embassy (you can not use your own doctor). There was one physician registered in Seattle, again located downtown, and agani perfect for me. The medical exam, at least the one I went through, was super simple. Basically, you are interviewed about your health, the health of your immediate family, and your sexual history. Then you get blood taken, a lot of blood, a couple of liters at least. I had a tan when I went to my exam, but I left that guy’s office looking like bleached onion skin. They need all this blood to conduct a bazillion different tests, and it gets divied-up and sent to different labs for the analyses. (Actually, they took five small test tubes worth, one for each of the five tests that are required.) The five tests are for determining your blood type and Rh factor, HIV, RPR (syphilis), hepatitis C, and hepatitis B with SAg. Well I’m happy to report that the U.S. government is not going to lock me down in quarantine.
The CoH is basically a two page form with a lot of text, and having only two little boxes for anything to be filled in, which are the doctor’s signature, and the date when the form is signed. That’s it. Here is where I had my one, and so far only, little snafu in all of this: apparently you’re supposed to bring this form with you when you come to the exam. This little detail is of course not revealed in any of the sources of information I read about obtaining a CoH, so I just assumed the doctor (we’ll call him “Doc”), being he was registered with the Embassy and all, would have the form in his office. Nope. And upon the both of us realizing this, he had the decency (that’s tongue-in-cheek for audacity) to not only ask me to get a form for myself, but to supply him with several copies for future use. I was a little surprised by this, but he was doing me a good service, and I needed to get one anyway, so I figured what the hell. It turns out the Embassy provides the form online as a downloadable PDF document. Doc didn’t have Internet access in his office, which also surprised me quite a bit because his office was pretty swank with huge tropical fish aquariums and all, so I downloaded a copy of the form and faxed it to him later. In the meantime, he went ahead with the exam and kept my file on hold until he received the form. That was a good thing, because he could have just blew me off until after I brought the form.
One more thing to note about the medical exam, which turned out to be another good deal. I have pretty good medical insurance with my current employer, but unfortunately, and not surprisingly, Doc’s office wouldn’t accept it. However, Doc allowed me to have my blood tests, which were really the biggest part of the whole exam, performed by my current medical plan. For this to work, Doc gave me a hand-written memo of what blood tests to have done. I was to take this to my doctor, have the tests performed with my covered insurance, and then my doctor would forward the results back to Doc. This was a nice break for me, as my insurance covered practically all of it, and it hardly took any more time than if Doc had the tests done in his own labs.
The final phase of the document gathering scenario is to have all the documents translated into the language where you are going. Again, you have to have a translator registered with the French Embassy, you can’t use your cousin’s French tutor. The closest translator to me was a bit out of Seattle, but this was no big deal because you don’t have to meet them in person, you just put copies of everything in an envelope and send it to them. The translator translates everything and sends it back. The whole thing takes a week tops. Here’s another good deal: It turns out that most of the documents don’t even need translations (saving you a few more bucks). The U.S. passport, as you might notice with your own, already has French translations written right into it. My AoL didn’t need translated because the attorney already notarized it in French, and I guess because she was an attorney, that was OK. Neither did the CoH need translating, because that form is also already in French. (There’s probably medical forms in different languages, depending on which country’s embassy your dealing with.) So the only thing the translator needs to work on for me is the birth certificate.
It almost seems too easy. I don’t want to jinx myself, but I can’t help but want to prepare myself for something unexpected, something like the French equivalent of…”sorry yank, it’s back to the U.S. you go to get that other document that you were SUPPOSED to have with you, and by the way, there’s a six month layover before you can come back again. Ahhhhhh ha ha ha ha ha ha ha….”
