Catherine, a 51-year-old woman from Hérault, had the bad surprise to learn that she had been married for 17 years to a stranger, in addition to her official husband! An unlikely story that seems difficult to solve.
If you have an administrative phobia, this story will send shivers down your spine! Imagine waking up one morning to find you’ve been married to a stranger for 17 years. That’s what happened to Catherine, this 51-year-old woman from Hérault. In June 2022, Catherine’s eldest son, aged 29, dies. The fiftieth anniversary therefore finds herself immersed in the administrative papers. This is how she became aware of a substantial administrative error.
Catherine is legally married to two men! On her marriage certificate, she is indeed married to her current husband. But on the birth certificate, she has been married since 2006 to the mayor of her commune. “It is clearly written there that I got married in 2006, the problem is that it is absolutely not my husband’s name that is written here but that of the mayor who united us”, says Katherine. An administrative error with serious consequences. Because legally, the birth certificate takes precedence over the marriage certificate.
What’s next after this ad
Deprived of compensation in the event of the death of her real husband?
Catherine is therefore worried, since if something happens to her husband, she will not be considered his widow and will not be able to receive anything, since in the eyes of the law, she is not married to him. An administrative error that could deprive Catherine of a survivor’s pension, for example. Since she noticed this unusual fact, Catherine tries in vain to solve this administrative problem. Each town hall passes the buck to itself and no legal solution has yet been found.
According to the lawyer handling his case “It’s just an error made by the birth town hall when transcribing the marriage certificate”. The fault would therefore be “of course correctable”, and the case could be solved easily. For this, you must send a request for rectification of an error in a civil act. A Cerfa document is then sent by the town hall of birth, which must be completed and returned and wait between one and two months for the birth certificate to be modified.
For the moment, the family prefers to laugh and have fun saying that “Granny is a bigamist”.