You would be lucky if forms were the only paperwork you had to worry about—but no, there are documents, too. At a minimum, you are going to need your birth certificate to complete your visa or green card application. You will also need your marriage certificate, if you’re past the fiancé stage. You may also need other documents, such as death or divorce certificates and your spouse’s birth certificate or U.S. passport.

When it’s time for your visa or green card approval, you will need a passport from your own country (either to travel to the United States or to hold a stamp showing your residence status). If you get married in your home country and you change your name, make sure your passport is either updated or is still considered valid with your maiden name in it.

Within the United States, official copies of birth, death, marriage, and divorce certificates can usually be obtained from the Vital Records office (called the Registrar’s or Recorder’s office in some areas) of the appropriate county or locality. Even if you already have your own copy of these items, it’s a good idea to request a certified copy from the Vital Records office. That’s because your copy may not have been given all the official governmental stamps necessary for USCIS to accept it as authentic.

You can find more details on the National Center for Health Statistics website at www.cdc.gov/nchs. (Click “Need a birth, death or marriage certificate?” in the box on the right. Or, check the blue pages of a U.S. phone book.) There are also services that will order your vital records for a small fee, such as www.Vitalchek.com.

U.S. passports are available to U.S. citizens through the State Department; see www.state.gov (click “Passports for U.S. Citizens”) or the federal government pages of a U.S. phone book.

Outside of the United States, records should be obtained from official, government sources wherever possible. The sources that USCIS and the State Department consider acceptable are listed in the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Manual (FAM). It’s accessible at http://travel.state.gov. (Under “Visas for Foreign Citizens,” click “more,” then select “Fees and Reciprocity Tables” from the sidebar on the left side of the page. Once you have opened that page, click on “Visa Issuance Fee - Reciprocity Tables,” then select the country about which you want information.) You’ll access information about the country you’re interested in using an alphabetical index. U.S. law libraries may also be able to locate copies of the FAM for you.

In the FAM, you can discover such fun (and relevant) facts as that Ascension Island doesn’t grant divorce certificates because of the lack of a supreme court, and that the place to obtain vital documents in Lithuania is called the Marriage Palace.

If you are overseas and do not have Web access, talk to your local U.S. consulate about what form of record will be acceptable, particularly if you need to document an event for which your government does not issue certificates.