I’ve just done the apostille for a range of documents for our family. Here are some things that I learned. Some of these have been mentioned before in this conversation.
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Don’t use Birth and Marriage certificates that you have on hand. Go to the Register of deeds and get fresh copies. Marriage certificates need to be <6 months old and birth certificates need to be <1 year old (in terms of when they were issued by the government entity).
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For the copy of the TIN, I made a copy of my social security card and had a “True copy” attestation notarized.
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For apostille in North Carolina, you can make an online appointment with the secretary of State. You can deliver the documents to Raleigh before 10:00 and pick them up the same day at 4:00 (if after 10 AM drop-off, you can get them the next day). You pay $10 per document and must include a cover letter. Cover letter and appointment link are on THIS page. There is also an option to do this by mail.
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For North Carolina, birth and marriage certificates (anything issued by a state agency) do not need to be notarized. Otherwise you need to notarize your documents. This was a point of confusion to me. I made up my own statement and my Portugal lawyer said it would work. I can comment later to let you know if SEF accepted it. We had to prove the dependency of college-aged kids with bank statements, certificates of enrollment, and a copy of the tuition bill. I made one notarized statement per document. Here is how my statement for the notary went (insert description of document):
Certificate for a True Copy
I, __________, do hereby swear or affirm that the attached is a true copy of the certificate of enrollment as a student for my dependent Jane Doe and that this copy contains no alterations from the original. -
Dependents over 18 also have to swear that they are single. Here is the language for that:
Single Status Affidavit
I, ____ (name of affiant), an American citizen Residing at (full address) ________ personally appeared before the undersigned notary public, and under oath or affirmation make the following statements: I was born on ____ in _____. I am a citizen of the United States. My passport number is _____. I hereby swear under oath that I have never been married. I am now single and otherwise legally free to marry.
Signature of affiant __________________
Date ____________ -
Our FBI background checks were interesting. To do them, you can go to the FBI website and request the background check ($18) and then mail in fingerprints ($0) or have them taken digitally at the Post Office ($50). I tried digital prints at the post office first and the post office near me never had staff to take the prints. It was much easier for me to do it by starting with an approved channeler. I used National Background check also called fast fingerprint and they charge $50 for the background check and $20 to capture your fingerprints digitally. The fingerprint capture was easy and on a walk-in basis with many locations at UPS and PakMail stores. I received the background check within minutes of having my fingerprints taken at the UPS store.
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FBI checks must be apostilled by the Department of State in D.C. I used monument visa to Apostille our FBI checks, but plan to do it myself next time. The main tip here is that the fillable form is broken and populates every line of the table. The price on the form is wrong. Be sure to send the correct money. You must fill out 1 form per FBI Check you want apostilled.