lost*in*cyberspace

There are occasions where you can use a marriage certificate as an alternative to certain documents:

http://www.uspassporthelpguide.com/p...-requirements/

Applicants that were born outside of the United States that do not have a birth certificate or consular report of birth abroad and have only one parent that is a U.S. citizen can use proof of citizenship of your parent, foreign birth certificate, a state issued document indicating that there is no birth certificate on file for you or an affidavit stating all of the locations your U.S. parent lived in the U.S. and abroad before you were born.

If both parents are U.S. citizens, then you can bring in their marriage certificate as an alternative to the aforementioned documentations. Minors and first-time adult applicants must apply for passports in person. Adults are considered to be 16 years old and older.

Identification and proof of citizenship must be provided, which includes the following forms of documentations: driver’s license, birth certificate, marriage certificates, I.D. card, military I.D. or previous U.S. passport that isn’t altered or damaged.

GUWonder

For children born outside of the US, it's sometimes the case that a passport renewal gets facilitated for the child by way of the parental marriage certificate being used as re-validating evidence of citizenship and/or of identity of the child.

For initial passports of foreign-born natural born US citizens, parental marriage certificate presentation is rather the norm.

My advice to natural-born US citizens born abroad and to parents of such US citizens is to keep multiple files of all the necessary information for: (a) proof of identity and of citizenship of the foreign-born, natural-born US citizen; and (b) proof of identity and of citizenship of the parents of such person. Why? In case the USG ever wishes to try to deny the US citizenship or use a "doubt" over the citizenship/identity status of the child or of parentage as leverage against the US citizen child or the parent(s) -- as has happened in recent years.

Need

I am not sure why, but if you think about it, why would they need my son's birth certificate for renewal? We gave them the old passport and they had his birth certificate when we applied for the original passport; so why would they need to see the birth cert again?

But, in our situation, we always bring the marriage cert with us when we apply for things.. just make it easier. My wife took my last name and she doesn't look Asian at all.

snic

They need evidence that you (the people claiming to be his parents and authorizing the application) actually are his parents. I have to agree that as long as the parents applying today are the same people as those applying 5 years ago, the birth certificate presented 5 years ago should be sufficient to establish parental relationship, assuming the passport agency kept a copy. Maybe that's why a plain uncertified photocopy is sufficient (hopefully in my case as well).

On the other hand, someone trying to traffic children would be unlikely to have even a plain photocopy of the birth certificate, so maybe the intent of requiring the copy to be submitted is to make it harder for this kind of crime to occur. If that's the case, I'm all for it.

GUWonder

From my understanding of the matter from representations made by enforcement authorities in policy-making/policy-reviewing positions:

1. Most of the trafficking of young children interdicted by LEAs in most OECD countries has involved children using real passports issued using legitimate supporting documents if any documents whatsoever.

2. The bulk of human trafficking of such children out of or into OECD countries is a matter of parents/relatives trafficking the children.

You can pretty much conclude that I think that a plain photocopy -- in this era of cameras on phones -- isn't doing much of anything useful to stop "this kind of crime to occur". The demand for such docs at time of passport application may help a bit with prosecution after the fact, but even that's not very useful to stop "this kind of crime to occur".

snic

An update: just got a status message from the passport agency saying the new passport is in the mail. So, in agreement with what a few people posted above, it seems that ordinary, non-certified photocopies of birth certificates are OK in some circumstances (in this case, it was to establish evidence of parental relationship, not evidence of citizenship; we sent the old passport in as evidence of citizenship).

One caveat is that we had sent a certified copy of the BC with the application for the kid's very first passport, so maybe they compared the copy we sent this time to a copy of what we sent the first time - and if we had sent in other evidence of citizenship the first time, perhaps a non-certified BC would not have worked this time. I really don't know.