Before we touch on how or why an application can take months or years to process, it is important to understand how the South African Home Affairs prepares your unabridged marriage certificate.

In order to compile an unabridged marriage certificate, an official verifies the original, hand written and signed BI-27 or BI-30 marriage document prepared by your marriage officer on the day of your marriage archived in Pretoria, against your Form BI-130 application submitted to Home Affairs. Thereafter the official verifies that the applicant’s full Christian names, their South African Identity numbers, their places of birth, previous martial status checks against South Africa’s population database.

The following information is crosschecked and makes it into the final certificate:

• The spouses full Christian and surnames,
• Both spouses South African ID numbers
• Both spouse’s dates of birth
• Each spouse’s place of birth and consequent nationality
• Each Spouse’s marital status prior to this latest union
• The church/magistrate’s court/ or other location at which the marriage ceremony was held
• The date on which the marriage ceremony was held
• The full Christian and surnames as well as the South African ID number of the marriage officer

Once the official is satisfied that all the information checks out, the request to populate and print the detailed certificate is issued. Its is important to note that the recently issued unabridged marriage certificates do not contain the word “unabridged”.

Although Q-pro can expedite the issuing of your unabridged marriage certificate, a typical application is processed anywhere from 6 to 8 and sometimes even as long as 12 weeks.

Please be aware that older marriages or divorces that have not been properly notarised can delay the processing time lines by anywhere from 6 months to a year or longer should they require a manual search through Pretoria’s archives.

It is advised that Unabridged Marriage Certificates be apostilled.

Q-pro is an independent document sourcing specialist with no ties to Home Affairs.