We can get certified copies of certain documents from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Washington D.C.

A certified document is a paper document which NARA attests to be a true copy of an original that is in their collection. It is accompanied by NARA’s seal of authenticity and bound with a red ribbon.

Certified documents are sometimes required in court cases or for other legal purposes. They are NOT appropriate for most genealogy researchers.

We can retrieve certified copies of census pages, passenger manifests, and some naturalization paperwork (see note below). These are the only types of documents that third party companies (such as ours) are permitted to retrieve. For certified copies of any other kind of document, please write to archives1reference@nara.gov for NARA’s procedures and pricing.

• Note regarding naturalization paperwork. We can retrieve these records only if they were filed in Washington DC. If they were filed anywhere else, then you’ll need to them from the closest NARA branch office. (But note that the New York City branch has closed and those records are now in the Philadelphia branch). You might be able to find an independent researcher that works at that facility on THIS page.

Our fee is $65 (which includes the fee charged by NARA) per certified document plus actual shipping. Multiple documents can be shipped together, of course, with a single shipping charge.

Due to limitations imposed by NARA on the number of requests per week, we typically ship within two weeks of your order by U.S. Priority Mail ($11.95).

Note that when prompted, you MUST include the URL(s) of the document(s) for which you want certified copies. Each URL must point to a page on Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org, or Archives.gov. Those are the only sites from which NARA is willing to certify a document.
(NARA will NOT certify a document from StatueOfLiberty.org, Heritage.StatueOfLiberty.org, HeritageQuestOnline.com or any other site. You will need to provide the URL for the same document(s) on one of the three approved sites listed above.)

If your attorney did not refer you directly to this page, please ask him/her to do so for future clients.  Thank you.