My wife and I live in Lugano, and we have a 3-month-old daughter who was born here at the end of last year. I thought I'd share our experience of getting her a

• Swiss birth certificate,
• British passport,
• Swiss residence permit, and
• British birth certificate,

in case there's anyone else who happens to be in the same situation in the future. I've recorded the full process we went through here.

We are both British, and we were both born in Britain. We're also married and living in Ticino. Of course the details may vary if the parents have different nationalities, are British but not born there, are not married, or are living in a different Canton.

A couple of things we would have liked to know in advance are

• that the Ticinese authorities require British documents to be legalized using an apostille before they can be used to register a birth, and
• that the British passport centre needs to see the original marriage certificate if submitting the mother's birth certificate as proof of nationality for the child and the mother changed her name at marriage.

The race was on to get our daughter's passport before flying back to the UK for Christmas, but I'm happy to report that we managed that with time to spare . The passport office in Paris were actually very quick, once they had all the documents they needed.