Definition of Civil Registry

As its name says, the civil registry is that body or body belonging to the State that is in charge of registering different aspects of the civil life of people, this means that it registers and controls aspects of a person's daily life that have to do with social space and not with space public. Some of the items that can be registered to one of these organisms they are marriages, births, deaths, divorces, censuses, etc.

All of them serve for the State to record, administer and control many data on different elements of the population which it governs.

Entity that arises with the modern state

It can be said that the civil registry as a public entity exists almost from the same moment in which the State arises as a form of government or control over a population. This is so because that State, in charge of governing a certain population, always needs to have some kind of body or entity that recorded very diverse data, including some that nowadays are no longer recorded due to lack of utility.

However, it is not until recently, after the French Revolution maybe and the loss of force of religion in the nineteenth century as an important and even central part of a State, that the civil registry is established as a very important section for the public administration. It is in this century when most of the states of the world began to remove the fueros and the power that the Church maintained over these aspects of social life as marriages, births and deaths to give it a secular value and to make all these issues come under the power of the State and not of the Church or the religion.

Today, civil registries are very important because they allow us to comply with a myriad of procedures and actions that did not exist before or that were not recognized by the Church.

Marriages, annotations of newborns recognized by their parents, are some of the most common procedures carried out in these establishments, as we already indicated lines above.

How marriages are celebrated in the civil registry

For marriages, the contracting parties must request an appointment at the civil registry, approximately one month in advance of the date they want to celebrate their marriage.
They can do it today thanks to the benefits of technology via Internet.
Then they should approach to provide the corresponding information to the couple and also the identification of the persons who will appear as witnesses to the marriage, a condition without equanom in this procedure.

On the selected day, the marriage will be celebrated in a civil registry room and a justice of the peace will officiate and take an oath before the law to the bride and groom. After the couple say the famous yes, I accept, they and their witnesses will sign an act, in which the conjugal union will be made official.

A fairly common rite around civil unions is that upon leaving the registry, relatives and friends of the bride and groom throw bags of rice on their heads.

Currently, many countries that have enacted the so-called equal marriage law, also allow the celebration of civil marriages between homosexual couples, such is the case in Argentina for a couple of years years.