Functions of the Civil Registry Office
The function of the civil registry office, following from the meaning of the abbreviation, is to record acts of civil status. Civil registry offices register:
- birth;
- marriage and divorce;
- adoption;
- establishing paternity;
- change of first/last name;
- death.
The main function of the registry office is the official documentation of civil status, and in some cases it is carried out only on the basis of documents issued by other authorities, for example, the court (in case of divorce through the court) or perinatal centers (registration of the birth of a child). The registry office does not independently establish these facts.
Documentation of these conditions, as a rule, does not differ in time from their occurrence, that is, for example, the husband and wife receive a marriage certificate directly on the day of the wedding, a child’s birth certificate is issued during the first few days of his life, and so on.
What can you get in the archive?
A fairly large part of requests to the registry office archive is related to the need to obtain duplicates of lost documents. However, the range of issues that a request to the registry office can resolve is quite wide and includes:
- registration of a duplicate of the civil registration certificate;
- preparation of an extract from the civil status record;
- preparation of explanatory certificates;
- registration of a certificate of amendments to civil status records;
- issuing a certificate confirming or refuting the fact of a change in surname and/or name;
- legalization and verification of the contents of civil status records;
- issuance of copies of documents, including at the request of investigative and court authorities, the prosecutor's office, guardianship and trusteeship authorities, etc.;
- issuing certificates of birth, death, etc. interested persons and bodies authorized to request such information.
Civil registry offices issue documents in the form of:
- repeated certificates in the forms established by order of the Ministry of Justice of Russia dated August 13, 2021 No. 167;
- certificates, the forms of which are established by order of the Ministry of Justice of Russia dated October 1, 2021 No. 200.
General rules for making requests
Repeated issuance of documents by the registry office is allowed:
- to the person in respect of whom the act was drawn up;
- a relative of the deceased in respect of whom the request was made;
- parents (persons replacing them) or a representative of the guardianship authority as representatives of a person under the age of majority for whom information is required;
- representatives of incapacitated persons appointed by the court;
- in the case of submitting a power of attorney certified by a notary from a person entitled to receive a repeated certificate of state registration of a civil status act - to the authorized person.
Documents will not be issued to the following categories of persons:
- birth certificate of a child - to a mother or father deprived or limited in parental rights;
- marriage certificate - to divorced spouses and persons whose marriage is declared invalid in accordance with the procedure established by law.
Actual records in the civil registry office are stored from 1918 to the present. After a hundred years, they are transferred to regional state archives, where they become publicly available.
Federal legislation defines the right of some persons to delegate the right to other persons to make an application for registration of acts of civil status, both in simple written form and by drawing up a power of attorney.
For example, a parent may authorize another person to apply for a birth. In this case, the section “Authorized to apply with the application” is filled out in the application, the details of the person who has been given this authority are indicated and a signature is placed.
How to write a request correctly
The forms of requests to the Civil Registry Office archive are determined by the Federal Law “On Acts of Civil Status” dated November 15, 1997. In particular, it established the following forms of requests for the issuance of reissued documents:
- request for a birth certificate - form No. 25;
- request for a certificate of marriage or divorce - form No. 26;
- request for a certificate of adoption (adoption) - form No. 27;
- request for a certificate of paternity of a child - form No. 28;
- request for a certificate of change of name or surname - form No. 29;
- request for a death certificate - form No. 30.
The form for contacting the Civil Registry Office archive with a request for information (certificates) about relatives is not regulated by law. Our website provides a standard template for such a request that you can use by entering your data. The request will need to indicate:
- data of the civil registry office to which it is addressed;
- name of the document “Request” or “Application”;
- request text starting with the word “please”. For example, “I ask you to provide a certificate of birth of my grandmother, Anna Igorevna Ikonova, born in 1925, place of birth in the village. Saraktash, Orenburg region, date of death approx. 1948, place of death unknown";
- the note “please indicate other information, if available,” if necessary;
- reason - why the information is required (applying to court, etc.);
- list of applications;
- date and signature.
It is advisable to apply for the issuance of duplicate documents, as well as information (certificates) about relatives, to the same civil registry office that issued the original document, however, if the place of issue of the original document is unknown, it is permissible to apply to the central registry office of the subject of the Federation.
Submitting an application is possible both in person and through the State Services portal. A duplicate of the document is usually issued on the day of application.
How to make a request to the archive about relatives? Archive request
And, nevertheless, you can clarify the specific algorithm of search actions only at the moment an individual situation arises. It depends not only on the degree of relationship of the applicant with the object of the search, but also on the legal situation at the current moment. These strict rules were not invented in vain. If you think about it, everything is quite logical and fair. It is unlikely that any of you would be happy to discover the following fact: some strangers completely freely gain access to the biography and other important nuances of the life of your relatives, or delve into the history of the family, looking for some kind of compromising evidence (often for unseemly purposes).
In informal communication, it has been noted that requests in a civilized and polite manner provide additional motivation for high-quality execution of requests. There is nothing surprising. Sometimes on archive websites there are warnings about the inadmissibility of crude demands and inadequate formulations. It is surprising that any of the applicants may not understand such things!
07 Jun 2021 etolaw 956
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What you need to have with you when applying to the registry office
When applying in person, a citizen will need to provide:
- passport or other identity document;
- documents - grounds for registering a civil status act;
- receipt confirming payment of state duty for the service. Depending on the type of document, the fee will vary.
What documents – grounds are we talking about? Let's look at an example.
To compile a family tree, the applicant needs a document about the birth of his maternal great-grandmother, who lived somewhere in the Smolensk region (the applicant does not know the specific place where the certificate was issued). In order for the Central Civil Registry Office of the Smolensk Region to issue a birth certificate, the applicant will need to attach to the application:
- original or notarized copy of the death certificate/certificate of the great-grandmother (if available);
- originals or copies of documents certified by a notary, starting from the parent and ending with the maternal grandmother: certificates or certificates of birth and marriage or a certificate/certificate of change of name/surname (if the mother or grandmother changed the surname outside of marriage).
How to make a request to the registry office in another city
To obtain a copy of the marriage certificate, you must download Form 19 (application form) from the official website of the regional civil registry office. Pay the state fee and attach the receipt to the application. Send by registered mail. The certificate will be sent to the registry office at your place of registration, and you will be notified about it. If you are interested in any other document, then you need to find the address of the registry office and in any way (by mail, electronically, by fax) receive an application form and a list of required documents. In this case, the requested copies will also be sent to the address of your registry office, and you will receive them by presenting your passport. But you can make it simpler: let your registry office send the request directly and there will be less red tape.
In December 2014, while collecting documents to apply for a pension, they asked me for a certificate of registration of my first marriage. To do this, I contacted the registry office of the Voskresensky district of the Nizhny Novgorod region, where I live at the moment, and I needed a certificate from Nizhny Novgorod. Arriving at the registry office, I wrote an application on the form given to me. Sent a notification letter. In January 2015, after the New Year holidays, I received an answer from Nizhny Novgorod. It said that in response to my request, a certificate of registration had been sent to the Kursk region of the Presnensky district (I could be wrong about the region), and that I could get it by contacting that registry office with a passport. I was puzzled as to how my ex-husband and I viewed the Kursk region if we had never been there. I called my registry office - it turned out that they had the certificate, and by mistake they almost sent me to the Kursk region. I came to the registry office and wrote an application for the issuance of this certificate. The certificate was issued free of charge - they do not charge money for the certificate.
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If no reason was found
Quite often, when establishing the facts of kinship, it happens that a person does not have the necessary supporting documents for some objective reason. In this case, you can do the following:
- Make do with an indirect document confirming the relationship.
- Wait 100 years from the date the record was made. After this period expires, the records are transferred to the state archive, where they become available to anyone.
- Apply to the court to establish the fact of a family relationship. Such applications are considered in a special procedure. You can read about the rules for drawing up such statements in the corresponding material on our website.
How to make a request to the registry office
In practice, some columns in the registration book could be missing or could be unfilled or incompletely filled in - this depended on the conscientiousness of the registry office employee and on the completeness of the information in the documents presented during registration. You should not expect to receive all of the information listed.
For some reason, it is necessary to indicate why the document is required. Perhaps this is required so that the civil registry office employee can decide which document needs to be issued: a repeated certificate or a certificate, and, if a certificate, then in what form. For the marriage certificate I indicated “due to family necessity”; for the death certificate I wrote: “for memorial and remembrance.” At the end he added: “The original documents confirming the relationship are available.”
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