State Certify

What does state certify mean? In the adoption process all documents drawn up for our adoption, which include documents like our birth certificates, marriage license, home study, financial documents, employment letters, medical reports, police reports, and our petition letter for adoption must all be first notarized (again thanks to our favorite notary Kim Chamness), then each notarization must be certified by the state.  This process means each document must be sent to each state's secretary office that it was notarized in to be certified in order to make it official.  This is a requirement made by many international countries and one of China’s requirements during the paper chase phase.  We are quite unique in that we have documents from all over the country.  Winn was born in Georgia, Scott born in Connecticut, married in New Mexico, and living in Texas--means we have a lot of individual state certification requests to send out.

Confusing at first, we made it simple by creating a spreadsheet and going to the dollar store and buying tons of envelopes.  To make it fun, each state's process varies a little bit and may require different forms to complete for the request of the certification.  Then you send the original, notarized document with payments that varied from $2.00 to 20.00 with a return self-stamped envelope to the Secretary of State office.  Our first documents were sent to Georgia and Connecticut for the certification of our birth certificates (the state certifies the county clerk's or registrar's signature instead of a notary), and we had no idea how long it would take, but were so thrilled when we received the state certified documents a week later.  Each state staples a nice certification page to the document that contains its unique state seal.  We are proud owners of state seals from TX, GA, CT, and NM (our favorite is Georgia's Great Seal....very official looking and they use two staples).   And for Adoptive families to be--DON’T remove the staples, all documents must remain in the original order to be accepted by the Chinese Consulate--makes photocopying kind of interesting. But hey it’s all worth it!