UK citizen marrying a USA citizen

Hi there,

Ok so here is my scenario: I am a UK citizen who will be marrying my US fiance next year in the US. We then plan to apply for her spousal Visa and come to live in the UK. As we are both quite impatient we want to apply for her visa in person in Wash. DC straight after the wedding and hopefully fly back to the UK together. But I have read it can take a few weeks to get the marriage license and I think we will need this to prove our wedding took place. Could anyone please help me with this enquiry?? For instance could we get a copy of the marriage license and sow that to the immigration officials in DC??  Thanks so much!!

An important point- you can't apply for a visa in person in DC.  The only consulates that handle visa applications are in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.  Which one you apply through depends on what state your fiancee lives in.  You need to have your marriage certificate before you apply for the visa- ask around, some counties will get the certificate for you a lot faster than others.

Just wanted to add that I got my marriage certificate the week after I was married, the clerk of court mailed it to us. But if you want other copies (which are always good to have) it might take 2 weeks for the certificate to be processed so that you could get them. Perhaps if you explain your situation things would go faster, like Andrea said it depends on the county and the state.

Getting the marriage certificate must vary from county to county and state to state.  If we had mailed our form in it would have taken about a week or so to get our certificate back.  We opted to take it ourselves in person to the courthouse and we got a copy certified in about 10minutes!  We actually paid $20 to get 2 more copies certified knowing we were going to have to be sending them out for things such as passport changes and visas.  All you need to do is call the courthouse or city hall and speak to the department that handles marriage certificates. That's what we did.