Dominican Certificates: Q&A
Dominican Republic vital certificates: Q&A
For example, the Archbishopric of Santo Domingo, located next to the María La Menor cathedral, has old records from some of the Santo Domingo parishes. The Mormon Church in Santo Domingo has started an aggressive program of computerizing old records.
Searching for Dominican vital records
Dominican vital records
The high humidity in the Dominican Republic and the deficient supply of electricity, and a shortage of public funds to spend on air-conditioning etc all mean that many original records outside Santo Domingo are in poor physical shape. Many old books have simply disintegrated.
Yes, the information on a certificate issued nowadays will be identical to the information on the certificate issued when you were born or married. The only difference is that nowadays certificates are issued on special coloured security paper, each sheet of which has its own serial/reference number, and has a hologram for security reasons. Until recently the certificates were printed on un-numbered headed white sheets of paper.
A certificate is actually an extract of an original record which is kept in a handwritten ledger. The certificate is proof that the record exists in ledger # X, on page X of date X. On the other hand, if at the time of the wedding ceremony pertinent details were handwritten incorrectly into the original ledger entry, for example if the civil judge wrongly copied the bridegroom Derek's name as "Kerek", or Derek's bride's date of birth as "3 June" instead of the correct 30th June, then the process involved to have the ledger entry retroactively corrected and altered, is extremely lengthy, and can take over a year. This is because Derek and his bride at the time would have signed to state that the above information was correct.
This should serve as a lesson to all that any mistakes should be corrected before the ledger is signed.
Ordering your Dominican certificates from the Dominican Certification Service
We start by invoicing you for a search fee. The amount we charge to search for your Dominican record depends on the age of the record, and on the amount of missing data. For example if you are unsure of the date, or do not know the name of a town of birth etc.
We start at the Central Registry Office in Santo Domingo or at the local registry office where the original record is stored - whichever is closest to us. If the birth/marriage/death etc took place in the past 30 years or so, then we don't expect any problems. Older records can be problematic, trying to get Dominican records from before 1980 can sometimes be very difficult.
At the registry-office, the staff look up your birth/marriage etc record in their computerized database, sometimes they're even able to view your scanned handwritten ledger record on their screen. Unfortunately, not all Dominican records have been computerized so we sometimes have no alternative but to conduct a manual search for the original ledger which contains your marriage record, which you signed when you got married. Some Dominican towns have more than one registry office, so now and again we have to visit all of the registry offices in that town to locate a record.
Once we have located your record, we ask at the registry-office for a draft print-out of your record. This draft copy is officially called a "consultation sheet". Before a consultation sheet can be issued, the handwritten ledger entry first has to be computerized by the staff at the registry office. If during this transcription stage the registry-office staff discover any strange anomaly in your marriage record, for example if part of your name is illegible, or if part of the record appears to have been tampered with, then before a consultation print-out can be issued, the local registry office close to where the marriage etc ceremony took place, cross-check against the identical original back-up ledger which is stored in Santo Domingo.
Once any potential uncertainty with the record has been cleared up, we then have a draft copy printed. We then scan the record and email it to you, to ask if it all looks correct. At this stage you may notice that some place- or people's names have been misspelled. If you alert us to a misspelling, we can attempt to have the record altered, however if the mistake lies in the original record ledger, changes are generally not permitted.
If you then wish to order a certificate from us, we then invoice you for the relevant Dominican birth, death, marriage, divorce or adoption certificate.
We then pay for your original certificate, and return later to pick it up.
Then we take your new original marriage certificate to be legalized at the Central Registry Office in Santo Domingo. To be legalized, your Dominican marriage certificate has a bar-coded sticker placed on the reverse of the certificate. You can check that the legalization is genuine by going to the webpage of the Dominican Electoral Board and entering in the bar-code number.
Most of our clients prefer that we take the legalized marriage certificate to the Dominican Foreign Ministry to obtain an apostille. See information on Wikipedia about apostilles. Basically, any Dominican official document with an apostille attached is considered legal and valid in most other countries of the world. (A handful of other countries such as Germany and Austria do not consider a Dominican apostille to be final proof that a Dominican marriage certificate is genuine, so for those countries' citizens we must take the certificate to the relevant embassy in Santo Domingo for them to apply the final seal to authenticate the document. This clearly comes with an added charge). Now your Dominican marriage certificate is ready to be dispatched to you.
Errors in Dominican public records
- Spelling or factual mistakes in the original handwritten ledger entry, where someone's name has been spelled incorrectly, or where the nationality is totally wrong. For example, "Derek" written as "Kerek", "García" written as "Garcías", or "Dominican" given as the nationality instead of "US citizen".
- Births etc which in the original handwritten ledgers have been recorded correctly, but which have been misspelled when the handwritten ledger entries have been computerized and typed into the registry-office database in order for the certificates to be printed. For example the date of birth in the original ledger entry may be correctly entered as "30 June" but during the computerization stage has been entered wrongly as "3 June".
A certificate is actually an extract of an original record which is kept in a handwritten ledger. The certificate is proof that the record exists in ledger # X, on page X of date X.
On the other hand, if at the time of the wedding ceremony pertinent details were handwritten incorrectly into the original ledger entry, for example if the civil judge wrongly copied the bridegroom Derek's name as "Kerek", or Derek's bride's date of birth as "3 June" instead of the correct 30th June, then the process involved to have the ledger entry retroactively corrected and altered, is extremely lengthy, and can take over a year. This is because Derek and his bride at the time would have signed to state that the above information was correct. This should serve as a lesson to all that any mistakes should be corrected before the ledger is signed.
Mailing your Dominican vital certificates
We use several services:
- Dominican certified mail - Generally takes about 2 to 8 weeks to arrive, but can take longer.
- UPS courier shipping. We generally use them for urgent deliveries to North America, Europe, and the rest of the world.
Order forms and a list of our rates for obtaining your certificates can be found by following these links:
