We only need three things from you to complete the expedited Texas apostille marriage certificate service process.
First, mail us or drop off your original Texas marriage certificate at our office. The marriage certificate you submit to us cannot be a photocopy or a notarized copy and you cannot fax or email us a copy of your marriage certificate to apostille or authenticate.
The Texas Secretary of State will only accept and issue apostille certificates and authentication certificates on your original Texas marriage certificate that are physically presented to them not copies.
When we say an “original marriage certificate” this means you have an original Texas marriage certificate that was issued at the time (year) of your marriage or a certified copy of your marriage certificate that you can order and obtain from the Texas county of where the official marriage record was first recorded at.
Do not send or drop off to us a Texas marriage certificate to apostille or authenticate if it was issued before 1980. Your Texas marriage certificate must be issued after 1980.
If not, you will need to order a new certified copy of your marriage certificate from the Texas county of where you were married because the Texas Secretary of State won’t be able to find that old of marriage record in their state records database.
If your state certified copy or original Texas marriage certificate was issued between 1980-1999 you have roughly a 50/50 chance that it will be rejected by the Texas Secretary of State because they won’t be able to find that old of marriage record in their state records database.
With that said we’ve successfully apostilled and authenticated many Texas marriage certificates issued from the 1980’s and 1990’s that the Texas Secretary of State found so we’ll happily attempt to file your Texas marriage certificate that was issued during these years.
But please be aware if the Texas Secretary of State does reject your Texas marriage certificate we will email you a copy and mail you the original rejection letter that the Texas Secretary of States issues on all rejected documents.
Then you will have to order a new certified marriage certificate copy and pay us our full apostille service fee a second time to reattempt to apostille or authenticate your marriage certificate for the second time.
Your marriage certificate cannot be issued from another state or country and it must be issued from the State of Texas.
If your marriage certificate was issued from another U.S state other than Texas you can only receive an apostille certification or authentication certification on a U.S marriage certificate or any other type of recordable document (birth certificates, death certificates, divorce decrees or divorce certificates) from the state in which the document originated and was issued from.
For example, if you got married in the State of California but you now legally reside in Texas you can only obtain an apostille certificate or authentication certificate on your California marriage license or marriage certificate from the California Secretary of State. The exact same scenario applies to all recordable legal documents and the 49 U.S states.
Apostille Texas only apostilles marriage certificates at the state government level for the State of Texas but if the country you’re sending your documents to is not a member nation of the 1961 Hague Convention you will need to go through two more legal document filing steps. We can assist you with these two steps even if we don’t obtain the state level authentication for you from a non-Texas state.
The second step is to rush file your marriage certificate at the United States Department of State (USDOS) office in Washington D.C but this step can only be done after you have been issued a state level authentication certificate by one of the fifty state secretary of state offices in the United States.
The third step is to rush file your marriage certificate with the foreign country embassy of where your documents are being submitted to in Washington D.C. This final document legalization step can only be done after you have been issued both a state and federal authentication certification on your U.S marriage certificate.
