Hi all,

I've searched through the threads related to birth certificates for parents of a newborn and haven't come across a situation close enough to mine.

I was born in the UK so I've ordered a new copy of my birth certificate from the UK General Registry Office website - no problem.

The missus however was born in Pakistan before moving to the UK when she was a little girl. Apparently, she was born in a little village somewhere in Pakistan and was not issued an official birth certificate. When her dad was filling in the papers for her to come over to the UK he got some local Doctor to type up a letter and stamp it to confirm her date & place of birth.

The in-laws think they have this letter stashed away in the attic somewhere, and that is it, and my problem is that it falls a long way short of what the Swiss authorities are accepting: an official birth certificate, not older than 6 months.

Other then visit them and explain the situation to them saying, this is all we have, I can't think what other recourse there is. Does anyone have any other suggestions on how to deal with this?

Thanks
Kash.

Wasn´t your wife asked to produce her BC upon British naturalisation ?

Would this link help in some way ?

http://www.ehow.pk/?p=13

http://www.eda.admin.ch/eda/en/home/...ak/achpak.html

Thanks for the links jrspet, i'll follow up tomorrow.

I've already made requests to other online agencies who deal with this sort of stuff but haven't received any replies yet. I'll chase up the embassy tomorrow.

When she went through the British naturalisation process (some 25 yrs ago) it was the typed letter from the local Doctor that was produced as a "birth certificate" - not a government issued certificate, because according to her and her parents, none exists.

My wife says that she was delivered by the local village lady "who helped women through labour" which about sums up how officially recorded her birth is :/

And the fact that the Pakistan Embassy in Bern has a yahoo based email account for enquiries.... well it says it all :/

Have the same situation for my wife and our child. Going to take ages to get the AHV number I need at this rate. Pah!

I suggest that go to the local authorities and ask them to give a certificate. I have heard a situation (Not in Pakistan) where the birth certificate was not possible like yours but the guy managed to go to the administration office and explained and got a government certificated attested by the authority. It worked in Swiss Embassy.

Just for fun, the Swiss Embassy person still went to the remote place to verify and as this was a local village hospital, he went there and demanded the records from hospital for verification. So it is like he got into hospital and told them that I am here to verify the birth of Mr. X who was born in this very place on 16 Jan 1972. The hospital guy immediately told the assistant to admit him for being mentally disturbed..

Hi Kash,

Both me and my wife are from Pakistan and was in a kind of similar situation when my daughter was born here. We gave the copy of hospital issued birth certificate for my wife but got it attested from the local Pakistan embassy in Bern. We communicated to the local swiss authorities that In pakistan the Birth certificate is only issued once and that's why we have got it certified/attested by the embassy. Try to talk to Pakistan embassy in Bern and they will give you more details about it. This attestation by embassy is also through post and yopu dont need to visit personally.

Regards,

Masood

Thanks for the info Masood. I'm just waiting for the in-laws to send over for whatever official documentation they've got regarding her birth, naturalisation, etc. When I've got it all in hand, that's when I'll get in touch with the Pak embassy.

How timely were the Pak embassy in attesting the certificates and in other communication?

You are welcome. I got the attested Documents back in 3 days(including a day each for sending and receiving via Post ) so the guys in the embassy were pretty good. After sending the documents, I followed it up with a phone call and the guy was very helpful.

Hi all,

Just wanted to update you guys with our success story.

As you'll recall, the problem in our situation was that my wife didn't have an official birth certificate from Pakistan. So the first thing I did was to call the Zivilstandamt who informed me that Pakistan has a system of late birth registrations and that we would need to go through that process to get an official birth certificate for my wife.

It was then that I decided to take a chance with these guys who I found while googling around:

http://www.mamooinpakistan.com

(mamoo - means 'uncle' in Urdu, and they're playing on the fact that they will do the jobs that you'd expect your uncle in Pakistan to do for you - if you had an uncle in Pak, that is)

Their service was very good. They kept me up to date with progress on the task via email. And if they required additional information they would simply call me during the day.

I provided them with scans of the following documents to get them started:
- the main page from both my wife's parents' Pakistani passports
- scans of the Pak National Identity Card of both my wife's parents
- scan of the main page from my wife's Pakistani passport (even tho it was expired)
- we also sent across a scan of the unofficial birth certificate that my wife possessed (an aged document typewritten and signed by the chairman of the committee of the village ).

And then voila! Not more than three weeks after submitting all these documents we received the official birth certificate through the post yesterday!

MamooInPakistan quoted a price of $200 but we asked them to have it notarized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (something which I think the Zivilstandamt would have asked me to do anyway). So with that and the courier costs all added up, the grand total was $400 (transferred via Paypal).

Having received the certificate yesterday I took all the documents with me this morning to the Zivilstandamt (based at Stadthaus - not Helvetiaplatz) and waited an hour while they drew up our daughter's birth certificate.

So in summary, I'm very happy that everything was resolved without major pain and at reasonable cost. I'm also happy with the service we received from MamooInPakistan and the reason I've fleshed out this post is because there isn't much customer feedback about them on the internet and I wanted to give them a glowing review because they really came up trumps for us, and I know there are other people who are in similar situations.

Kash.

PS. Zivilstandamt wanted to keep the original copies of my wife's birth certificate and our marriage certificate. Of course, I said no to this, so they made a photocopy of each, then stamped and signed the copy and then charged me 32CHF per photocopy for the pleasure! This was despite my having a Pakistani notarized (photo)copy of the birth certificate for them. Oh well...

It's always good when someone comes back to say what exactly happened. There so many open-ended Threads on here, it can be quite depressing when looking for information.

I'm glad that all turned out well too. Enjoy the extra freedom now!