Authenticating in NY - oops!

NY Supreme Court, 60 Centre St, NYC

To any NY'ers out there authenticating your dossier on your own, you may want to take note of this...

Alert #1: Your docs do NOT go directly to your Secretary of State. We found this out when our entire packet was returned to us last week. New York law requires your packet go through the NY County Clerk's office PRIOR to reaching the SOS.

So rather than wasting more mail-time, with packet in hand I hit the subway yesterday and headed downtown to the land of Law & Order. (If you're patient, you can wait while they do it). And I'm very glad I did this in person b/c another mystery was uncovered in the process.

Alert #2: New York consists of Queens (Queens) County, Kings (Brooklyn) County and New York (Manhattan) County. Well, even though all of our NY docs were notarized in Manhattan, they can't all be processed by the NY Cty Clerk's office. The reason is b/c a notary's stamp is valid where they LIVE, not work. The small type on a few of our notarys' stamps listed Kings Cty and Queens Cty, meaning they don't live in Manhattan. This nugget of info was not on our radar when notarizing our docs months ago. These docs can't be processed through the NY County Clerk's office.

Lesson learned. At this point, it's more time efficient for us to have the docs re-notarized by a notary living in Manhattan and return to the New York County Clerk's office, rather than schlepping off to find the offices in Queens & Brooklyn.

So once this is done, I will definitely be presenting our completed packet in person to the Secretary of State. We can't lose anymore time. I have already confirmed that the other states (NV, PA, DC, WV, NJ) currently reviewing our packets, do not require processing through their County Clerks' offices.