What is Apostile? Why is it neccessary? How does it work? These are important questions that you need to be aware of, as you progress into married life with your spouse. This has far ranging impact, as I will attempt to show.
Some years back, a large group of nations, including Russia, Ukraine and the US all agreed to streamline the legalization of domestic documents, by accepting the legality of documents of another nation as their own. By "domestic documents", I mean such things as marriage certificates, birth certificates, divorce papers, etc. This international acceptance of domestic legal documents is called "Apostile". What exactly does this mean for us? Here's a real world example:
My wife is changing her last name on her passport to her married name. In order to do this, she needs to register our American marriage at the marriage bureau in Ukraine. According to the international agreement, our American marriage certificate is accepted as legal under the precepts of Apostile.
Is it that simple? Not exactly, as we have just found out. I sent a certified marriage certificate over with my wife, but it wasn't accepted. Apparently, you need to get a seal of Apostile from the Secretary of State of your state. My local county goverment employees didn't know this and tried to tell me it was fine. My friends who have had to deal with this before have told me otherwise. After checking with the Secretary of State, I sent out a letter with all the important information and a check for $5.00. Supposedly, I will get my seal of Apostile tomorrow. Once I have that, I will send the seal, along with the document I got the seal for (it is linked to the date the document was issued, not recorded) to my wife. This should help us clear this little legal hurdle.
You might want to save this info somewhere. I suspect it might come in handy in the future for some of you...
