Post marriage process - moving US to UK

Hello.
We are getting married next may. I am a British citizen and my fiancee is a US citizen. We plan to marry in the US and then move back to England. We need to know what the process is for her to get a visa so that she can return with me. What I have found out so far is that visas can be issued same-day providing you turn up with the right documentation at the UK embassy in either NYC, Chicago or LA. We plan to go to NYC as we're getting hitched in northern VA. Only problem is, I only have a finite amount of time off work to fit in the wedding and honeymoon. The local authority in VA says that once married you must mail off the marriage certificate and it will not be available to get a copy until a couple of weeks afterwards.

So I guess my questions is - would we be able to take away the actual original copy of the wedding certificate on the day of our wedding and take that to NYC to use as proof of marriage before mailing it into the authorities in VA.

Any other help on this whole process would be appreciated (what other proof we need etc) as the last thing we want is to get married and have a honeymoon booked and then find out we are stuck in the States until we can sort the whole visa thing out.

Thanks in advance
Scott & Caitlin

I was in the same situation... You must have a certified copy of your marriage certificate to apply for the visa. My husband and I had to call around to different counties to find one that would give us a certified copy the same day. We ended up driving to a neighboring state to get married.

Hi -- welcome!

Here's a list of everything we took to my spousal visa appointment: http://www.freewebs.com/richard_and_lola/ukspousalvisainfo.htm

Among_the_stars is correct -- you can't take the original certificate to the consulate as it won't have been certified yet (i.e., your marriage won't be legally recognised by the city/county in which you were married).  You can either head back to the UK whilst your wife waits for the marriage certificate and applies for her visa (either in person or by post) or you'll have to find another city/county/state with a quicker turnaround time.