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Comment by miracle2k | Hacker News Reader

It's actually somewhat similar in Germany. You need a Ehefähigkeitszeugnis, essentially that document proving that you are not married yet. You would have needed to get this from the US.

Because most countries don't have that sort of document (including the US), you then instead need to apply to your local Oberlandesgericht (Higher Regional Court) for an exemption.

All the way, any foreign government documents need to be notorized by the German embassy in that country.

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Virtually all common law countries provide this easily, and civil law countries provide a slightly different worded document of similar usage, i.e. a certificate of being eligible to marry under your country law. In most cases they are treated as equal once you have them, although the procedures and conditions vary.

> Because most countries don't have that sort of document (including the US)

They don’t? I thought this was a pretty standard sort of document to get…

It is, the GP is wrong, its called a Statement Of No Marriage, many states can provide this.

No, I had to do this when I moved to Europe with my non-married fiancee.

Some states can give you a statement saying "This person never has gotten married in our state", but they cannot pull the records of every state. In fact, the state that I was living in could not even do that -- only individual counties could pull records saying "This person did not have a wedding within this county". There are no central records.

When I tried to use that as a record of non-marriage, it was not accepted for the above reasons. My fiancee and I needed to give a signed oath to a notary that we were not married, and take that document to the state's office to be apostilled.

Well, if they want a federal document that makes sense, and yeah I don't think the fed issues that, we're too stratified so there's no such thing as a federal marriage license afaik.

I think the real issue is that what they want is a document that the person is not married. A state document might work if states required and tracked documentation for out-of-state marriages of residents, and could confirm that the person was a resident who would be subject to that requirement and was not, per records, married, whereas what the documents offer is documentation that an event did not occur within the state, not the absence of the condition of being married.

I can't speak to whether that would qualify in Germany, but it seems like it'd be pretty easy to establish residency in some state for the explicit purposes of getting one of these if you were committed to this for some sort of scam or something.

I am seeing different things online about this, de.usembassy.gov says "no such government issued document exists in the United States", but maybe they are referring to the federal government.

In any case it say that since 2021 Germany will accept a sworn oath from US residents to declare their eligibility.

Yes, it is. Usually, a certificate that says, "No record of marriage of this person in this county". Though, there is still a step to apostille and translate it to German for German cities to use it.

I don't know how common it is, but this is a page of the Stuttgart court:

https://oberlandesgericht-stuttgart.justiz-bw.de/pb/,Lde/Sta...

- Countries without a link they have no info

- Countries with a link, but are cursive, generally provide the certificate in most cases (this seems to be broken, I see no cursive ones, but the UK is among this group, which one can see when opening the link; but that seems to be the minority).

- All others they seem to suggest need to go through the exemption process.

How does one prove one isn’t married? Is it a sworn statement, or is there something else?

At both my European countries you can request an official document confirming your unmarried status at the city hall, and more recently, online.

Obviously, all the bureaucracies that require such a document also have a mechanism to issue it.

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