Discrepancy in Ancestor's Marriage and Birth Certificates

[TheInvisibleFisherman]

Long story short.

The birth certificate from Italy says my ancestor was born in 1852.

The marriage certificate from Uruguay says he was 28 at the time he was married. He was married in 1884. 1884 - 28 = 1856. The marriage certificate never explicitly says my ancestor's date of birth however.

Will this be a problem?

[AlfaRomeo4Ever]

Fisherman: Although many of us here like to provide helpful comments, opinions are not always an indication of how your local Consulate will treat this discrepancy. The Consulate are the ONLY people whom can answer your question with a definite answer.

If you read others posts, you will see that each Consulate treats the documents with varying amounts of criticality. Some don't care about minor name mis-spellings and date innacuracies, while other Consulates expect everything to be 100% correct, or they send you back home to get things corrected!

It is a real pain to get documents ammended, but it can be done in every country. (I'm also going through this process myself.) You can take you chances and show up for your appointment with what you already have, but if it involves the expense of travel - I'd ask the consulate this question beforehand and see what they say. That is...if you can get anybody to answer you! I've been waiting 3 weeks now for the LA Consulate to answer my email! Good luck.

[jennabet]

I also see this as not a problem. For sure the document from Italy cannot be changed as this is the information the consulate will go with and not with the age of the groom on the Uruguayan marriage certificate. We had a marriage certificate from Pennsylvania that listed the age of the Italian groom as one year older than the actual date on his Italian birth certificate. It was never questioned by our consulate.

[sceaminmonkey]

I can almost guarantee that the NYC consulate will pick it out. T be honest it's up to the consular officer and they can choose or not choose to pick out the small stuff. It seems that they use to be easy going but the past 2 years they have cracked down. Best advice is don't freak out but since you have not made your appointment you should try to amend the marriage certificate if possible. Good luck

[jjohnston2020]

I agree it totally depends on consulate representative and his mood. Overall it shouldn't be a problem, as it happens a lot, and they understand it.

[vinnyz]

This is not a problem because in much country the age indicated in the old marriage certificates does not correspond with the real age of the person.

Nothing extraordinary four years apart.

It's common for the marriage certificates to put an incorrect age? How can that be? Was it typical to lie about your age back then? Or was it never asked and the person filling out the form just guessed? I never thought about this before. I can imagine how this can cause all sorts of problems modern day.

[vinnyz]

I talked with my grandparents about this and they did confirm that it was commonplace for your age to be guessed when the marriage forms were filled out. I really don't think that would go over well if ages were guessed on documents today. Can you imagine someone fudging their birthday on an expatriate health insurance application? It wouldn't get accepted.