This may be the easiest step in our journey to dual citizenship.
Birth certificates are required for all children under the age of eighteen. Well, that part was simple. I opened our safe, and grabbed the original birth certificates for my two sons.
They each also need something called an Apostille from the Secretary of State of the state in which they were issued. According to Wikipedia, "The Hague Convention Abolishing the Requirement for Legalisation for Foreign Public Documents, the Apostille convention or the Apostille treaty is an international treaty drafted by the Hague Conference on Private International Law. It specifies the modalities through which a document issued in one of the signatory countries can be certified for legal purposes in all the other signatory states. Such a certification is called an apostille (French: certification). It is an international certification comparable to a notarisation in domestic law."
Our children were born in Nashville, so that means the Tennessee Secretary of State. Since Nashville is the state capitol, that just meant going downtown to the Department of State in the Snodgrass Tower and going to the 6th Floor.
This may be the cheapest step in our journey as well. It only cost $2 each to get an apostille affixed to each of their birth certificates.
Later, we will need to get the certificates translated as well, but we'll wait to do that when we have all of the documents in hand.
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apostille affixed to a birth certificate