My daughter is 15 and just renewed her US passport. Inside the cover page she is asked to sign the document. Because she is still pretty young, she has never been required to give a legal signature on anything, but now she needs to. The signature she wants to use is just her first name, and it is basically in a printed style.
My question is what expectations are there, if any, on what is included in a signature, other than it must be consistent over time? If her signature is just her printed first name, and she uses it consistently, will anyone ask questions?
I should add that her last name is double-barrelled with 14 characters total, so including some form of the last name is a bit burdensome.
You must sign with your full name as it is shown on your passport. A passport is something you don’t want questioned when you are traveling. I see no requirement that the signature be cursive.
That’s not a cite to an official site ( ), but this is the official one and it has the same instructions albeit more tersely:
Which says blue or black ink and full legal name.
Sounds like maybe daughter needs some effort on picking out a real sig style, and then practice making it consistently before she puts pen to passport. Unlike, say, writing a check or signing a charge slip, there are no easy do-overs on that one.
The oldest sig sample I have of me is age 12. It was my full name in my neatest (which is to say “objectively poor”) cursive. By the time I was out of high school I had settled on a consistent style that I use to this day. Which amounts to stylized but readily legible first letters of all 3 names, similarly stylized more or less identifiable shapes of the last letters, and a random squiggle in between. Which I use in three different formats: First Last, First MiddleInitial Last, and First MiddleName Last. And of course could also be used with just first initial if the need ever arose.
OP daughter probably needs to sort out something in that general direction for herself.
Aside:
We all still need to sign documents now and again. Funny enough, the increasing e-everything means that nowadays the few times we’re signing something on paper with a pen, it’s something lastingly legally important. Like a lease, a will, a passport etc. Gone are the days of signing your name a dozen times a day on mere ephemera.
I’ve seen signatures that basically amount to the initials of the person, so the consistency is probably the only real expectation.
Although, from my experience, a signature usually starts off with a regular writing of the name, and just gets abbreviated into a quicker flourish over time. Meaning, with most signatures, the signer could probably explain how the scribble they make morphed from a more typical written script.
I doubt it. They may note that it is a childish looking signature, but that’s just because she hasn’t had to sign it a million times, and so hasn’t yet developed the quicker , messier version that will eventually be her standard signature.
The real risk, I would think, is that a simple printed style is easier to forge.
An interesting question. For passports specifically, DoS says they want full name in your hand. Whether that is exactly your “signature” is another matter.
Admittedly sigs are sorta obsolete. E.g. …
Ever since the advent of credit card terminals at checkstands or now the remotes that restaurant servers carry, I sign the screen with a large X. The sigs scribed onto the back of my credit cards are all my conventional illegible squiggle that is clearly identifiable as representing a name sorta the same shape as my own.
In umpteen thousand CC transactions over the last 15-ish years IIRC nobody has ever refused my X although a few have commented on it jokingly.
There’s no reason there’d be a connection between a person’s name and their signature? The definition of a signature is a distinctive rendering of a person’s name. Merriam-Webster gives it as: “the name of the person written in his or her own hand.” I suppose you could choose whatever form of “fanciful” hand you want and create something that doesn’t look like your name or even isn’t your name, but it’s by definition a styling of your name.
YouTube lawyer Steve Lehto did an episode about the requirements for a signature to be valid. Most is based on the UCC which covers a lot of stuff. Generally, it merely has to be something that you use as a signature. Remember the old “X” mark for people who couldn’t write?
In particular, it does not have to be in cursive.
I don’t understand how the US Passport office can require something more specific.
Only, is forging the signature on a passport even necessary? I.e. do immigration officials or other ever make a person sign and compare with the passport, for purposes of verifying ID?
I do not recollect ever having had my signature on an ID document of any kind compared to an in-person signature. The photograph compared to my real ugly mug, certainly (I look equally grim in person and on my passport/ID card photographs).
For what it‘s worth I have had to sign on a touchscreen a lot of times in the last years - as a receipt for packages mostly, but also for car rental and other agreements - a lot of businesses have abandoned shoving over paper to be signed. My finger-on-touchscreen attempt at a signature is totally different from my pen-on-paper signature (I imagine that is the case for most people), also very inconsistent because it depends on the ergonomics of the touchscreen position, but nobody took issue with that.
“On a passport for a child under 16, a parent should print the child’s full name on the signature line. The parent should also sign their name next to the printed name of their child, and note their relation to their child (example: mother, father, or guardian).”
My signature is a scribble that looks more like a pen malfunction than a name of any language. I use the same one on all my documents, including passport, and I’ve never had an issue with any of them anywhere in the world.
I’ve never encountered anyone at border control who asked me to sign something and compared it with the signature on my passport - but I’ve encountered plenty of times where I’ve signed something and needed to show some ID with my signature ( which might be my driver’s license or might be my passport) as proof.
I am going to point out that while the instructions say you are to sign your passport with your full name, there is no requirement that it be legible and many signatures consist of a first and last initial with unreadable squiggles after them.
Up here in Manifest Destiny land, children under 16 MAY sign their passport but are not required to do so, in which case it should be left blank. Parents should explicitly not sign it.
From what I understand, you have to essentially make your “mark”, which doesn’t have to actually be a written signature. The important thing is that it’s uniquely yours.
I know more than one person whose signature is an unintelligible squiggle that bears no resemblance to their actual name in any way, shape or form. One’s an attorney I know, and another’s the finance guy at the car dealership where I bought my car.
So I’d imagine your daughter’s chosen signature would be just fine, so long as that’s her signature going forward. And I imagine for a fifteen year old, it’s even ok if she changes it up, but I think it’ll need to be somewhat solidified by around the time she’s 18 or so.
The OP asks two questions, but not with great clarity. IMO they are:
Can a person adopt a single written name as a sig for general purposes?
Can they sign their passport that way?
As we’ve variously said, the answer to #1 is you can adopt anything you want from a X to calligraphy to perfect Palmer cursive to an inkblot. As long as it’s reasonably consistent over time, with some allowance for teens growing into their final adult sig.
And the answer to number two is given by the State Department. Who legally still own your passport; you’re allowed to carry it, but it’s theirs, not yours, and you must give it back if asked. The answer to #2 is: your passport must be signed using your full legal name. Period. So say the cites upthread.
It seems useful to me that folks are clear about which question they’re opining upon.
Well, since we are aiming for clarity, allow me to nitpick that the DoS website says full name and not full legal name.
And given how very specific these same people are about what constitutes an acceptable passport photo, I find the lack of specificity about sigs in the site to be rather revealing.
Incidentally we never signed her previous passport all, and no one even noticed until I went to get it renewed
But, yeah, my takeaway is that the signature the DoS is looking for does not necessarily have to match the signature you would use at the bank
), but this is the official one and it has the same instructions albeit more tersely: