esmeralda2:
Everyone should have a passport and lock it away in a safe deposit box when you are not using it, and update it when it is going to expire. If you’ve got a birth certificate, that too should be locked up in a safe deposit box.
We have a safe-deposit box, but in my case the only reason I don’t keep my passport there is I need it fairly often, and going to the bank to retrieve it every single time would be too troublesome. I have a Thai driver’s license, which is often accepted as a substitute for local purposes but not always. So I keep it here with me, and if there’s a fire – which has never happened in all my decades here – then it will be the first item I grab. If that happens while I’m not at home, I do have my passport registered with the State Department and hopefully it won’t be too much of a hassle to replace it.
Hari_Seldon:
I was astonished too. It was when I retired on the last day of the millennium (1999 and I am not getting into an argument over that–my personal calendar begins with a year 0). My employer was converting my retirement account into an annuity and wanted to see my birth certificate. I figured that informal name changes were common enough so I could explain why the name on my BC was different from the name I used all my life. Literally, my father made the change when he was unemployed in 1937 (perfectly legal if not done for fraudulent purposes) in order to conceal a Jewish name. So, save for the birth certificate itself, I had never used the birth name for any purpose. In particular for school, for an SS card, for immigration to Canada, etc., etc. My first passport required that two people sign a notarized statement that they knew me under both names. I don’t what would have happened had my parents not been alive, since there was literally no one else who knew me under both names. Subsequent passports were issued no questions asked.
Anyway I wrote to Harrisburg, gave my birth name, place (the hospital, since I assumed that was on the record somewhere), parents’ names and assumed they would send me a certificate in my birth name. Instead, someone wrote back and said that since the name on my BC was not the name I was currently using, if I could send them photocopies of documents showing that I had used this name for at least ten years, they would issue a BC in the name I used. So I photocopied my college and grad school diplomas along with a couple expired and one current passport and the new BC was issued. It has occurred to me that with all the heightened security these days, that might not happen today.
Wow. Wish it were that easy now. It isn’t really that it is so difficult as much as it is expensive.