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by BytesAndGears 807 days ago
No, I had to do this when I moved to Europe with my non-married fiancee.

Some states can give you a statement saying "This person never has gotten married in our state", but they cannot pull the records of every state. In fact, the state that I was living in could not even do that -- only individual counties could pull records saying "This person did not have a wedding within this county". There are no central records.

When I tried to use that as a record of non-marriage, it was not accepted for the above reasons. My fiancee and I needed to give a signed oath to a notary that we were not married, and take that document to the state's office to be apostilled.

1 comments

Well, if they want a federal document that makes sense, and yeah I don't think the fed issues that, we're too stratified so there's no such thing as a federal marriage license afaik.
I think the real issue is that what they want is a document that the person is not married. A state document might work if states required and tracked documentation for out-of-state marriages of residents, and could confirm that the person was a resident who would be subject to that requirement and was not, per records, married, whereas what the documents offer is documentation that an event did not occur within the state, not the absence of the condition of being married.