Two ways to get married abroad

There are two ways to get married abroad and have that marriage legally recognized in the United States:

1. Do all the legal stuff in the U.S. and leave the adventure wedding to be all the fun parts about getting married. The photos, the dressing up, the carefree laughter and frolicking through the landscapes for the camera.
2. Do the actual marriage licensing in Iceland, communicating with both their government offices and ours many, many times. You still get to galivant through the landscapes for the camera (in fact, the actual wedding day itself is no different). But you have all kinds of paperwork in both countries, for several months leading up to the wedding day, and for several months after the wedding day.

One of these two options is way easier than the other. Can you guess which one we chose? Option 2, you say! Oh, indeed, dear friend… you know us well.

Why would we choose to do it the hard way?

Three reasons:

1. Since we were going to all this effort to get married in Iceland anyway, it just wouldn’t have felt the same to us if the actual marriage certificate wasn’t in Icelandic. Plus, we thought having an Icelandic marriage license would be really cool.
2. We inadvertently discovered, as we were doing our research on how to make this all work, that most countries have a formal marriage registry. It’s basically a big database of records for everyone that ever got married. Seems like a pretty logical and straightforward thing to have, right? Yet the United States doesn’t have one! Marriages here are recorded by each state, and they each keep those records however they will. Nationally, there is no consensus on how to do this, and thus no database. When we discovered this, it just gave us extra ammo for wanting our names recorded side by side… at least it would officially be in someone’s database of marriages!
3. Jess is actually nuts enough that she ahem luxuriated in the challenge of communicating with multiple government agencies in both the U.S. and Iceland. No really, she actually wanted to and even kinda enjoyed the experience :)

What we had to do before we went to Iceland:

Here’s a rundown! Make no mistake, it looks all easy when it’s laid out in this format, but when we first started looking into this, we honestly didn’t know much about the whole process. It took several weeks of piecing things together. There’s a lot of advice online, but the truth is that every state is just a little bit different, and sometimes the information Iceland needed, although nicely laid out online, wasn’t as clear as it first appeared to be.

1. We reached out to Siðmennt, the Ethical Humanist Association of Iceland to request a celebrant (officiant). We wanted a non-religious ceremony, and appreciate as well as agree with the values of Siðmennt.
2. For the legal parts in Iceland, we communicated with Sýslumenn (The Commissioner’s Office). There are several documents they required us to submit. Some were straightforward, such as Birth Certificates and Passports. Our personal favorite document was Hjónavígsluskýrsla (Marriage Notification). We had an embarrassing hiccup with this document (details in next section). We also needed a Certificate of Marital Status. Remember how the U.S. doesn’t have a marriage database? Well, that means we can’t get a Certificate of Marital Status, so instead we had to…
   

   Hjónavígsluskýrsla
3. Request a Search of Vital Records for Marriage in our home state. We ended up doing this in Montana, and it was a challenge to have timely communications with them during the height of COVID.
4. We needed above mentioned Search to be official with an Apostille. These are entirely separate offices, and the Vital Statistics office was more than a bit confused about why we needed our search of vital records to have an apostille. Apparently, they don’t get this request often.

Iceland has a strict timeline on when all of this should be submitted by. They also have a time window, meaning some of the documents can’t be older than a couple of months, which meant we couldn’t do our vital records search any earlier than about 2 months. Unfortunately, even though we reached out to the vital records office as early as this 2 months allowed, somehow two days before we needed to mail our documents to Iceland, events went something like this…

Jess calls the Office of Vital Records for something like the fifth time. Their office is utter chaos. Our document has been hanging out there for perhaps a month at this point. She then calls the Apostilles office to plea for help. Apparently, these two offices are a block away from each other. The Apostilles lady, who was Jess’s pal by this point (seriously, she even requested a couple wedding photos and we sent some to her as a thank you), physically walked down to the Office of Vital Records, picked our documents up, took them back to her office for an apostille, and then hand delivered them to the post office for overnight shipping. They arrived in our hands the next day, spent all of 2.5 minutes in our possession whereupon they were taken to our closest shipping depot and express mailed to Iceland. After hanging out in Germany for a teeth-bitingly extended layover, they hopped up to Iceland and arrived in their office literally half an hour before COB on the last day possible to submit them. To be fair, the offices in Iceland were well acquainted with our situation by that point and sounded like they would have allowed us one extra day… maybe… we’re glad we didn’t need to find out!

How this process continued in Iceland:

Essentially, you send in photocopies of everything ahead of time which you are then expected to show the real deal of once you physically show up in Iceland. If everything goes smoothly, you should show up at Sýslumaðurinn á höfuðborgarsvæðinu (The District Commissioner of Greater Reykjavik), show your passports, and then they should give you all your documents back along with a “license to wed.” You then take this to your celebrant to have signed the day of your wedding.

This smooth, easy process is NOT how things went for us, because we made a rather hilarious and embarrassing (perhaps even millennial) mistake. That story is too long for this little blog post, but we’d love for you to read about it in Misadventure with our Marriage License.

What we had to do upon our return from Iceland:

1. We first contacted Þjóðskrá (The Registration Office) in Iceland to request certified copies of our marriage license. Several copies arrived in the mail a few weeks later, and then we began the process of trying to figure out how to file them in a country that doesn’t have a national marriage registry…
2. If you do your research about validating a marriage license from another country in the United States, everything says to contact the Office of the Attorney General. Full disclosure, Jess did this in two separate states (Montana and Washington). In both cases she was sent to various other offices and told that the Attorney General does not handle this in any capacity. Proof that Google is not always right. After several dead ends of calling different offices, the Vital Records Office was able to point us in a good direction.
3. Turns out the answer is way simpler than we (and nearly everyone in the Attorney General’s office) thought. The Clerk and Recorders Office is where we eventually ended up. They took a copy of our Icelandic marriage license, uploaded it into the State’s official records, and voila! We even have a document number where we can look it up.
4. And last but not least… we both changed our last names!