Notary Certificate
A Notary Certificate must always accompany acknowledgements and jurats. The purpose of the notary certificate is to help prevent fraudulent creations of notarized documents and seals. This can include photocopying or switching out a notarized page and attaching it to another document or even altering the number of pages within a notarized document. The notary certificate may be preprinted on some documents however you will need to add this on most documents. When the notary certificate is preprinted on a document you must review it to ensure it contains all the required items. If it doesn’t, you will need to either add those items into it or add a new one to the document.
There is no size requirement for this certificate, but you must be able to fill it in legibly.
There are three separate types or the notary certificate and you must remember all three in detail. We will go over the three types in detail on the next few slides. The first type is for documents that are being filed with the Bureau of Conveyances, the second type is for documents that are not being filed with the Bureau of Conveyances, and the third type is an alternative to the first two and is written directly into the acknowledgement or jurat.
The notary must add their official seal and signature to the first two notary certificates. Since the notary must add their seal and signature to the notarization and the notary certificates there will be two seal impressions and two signatures, once for the notarization and once for the notary certificate.
Please note that the third type of notary certificate will only require one notary seal and signature to be placed as the notary certificate in this case is written directly into the acknowledgement or jurat.
As mentioned in the previous slide, the first type of notarial certificate is for documents that are being recorded at the Bureau of Conveyances. These documents can include deeds, mortgages, trusts, and many other legal documents. While you are not required to know if a document is or is not being recorded at the Bureau of Conveyances you will need to make sure you use the correct notary certificate if it is. As such, it is a good rule of thumb to use the first type of notary certificate if you are unsure if the document being notarized will be recorded at the Bureau of Conveyances. This notary certificate contains the most information and is acceptable for documents that are not being recorded at the Bureau of Conveyances.
As a note, the custom notary certificate stamp that is included as part of the cost of this training will be the Type 1 notary certificate.
Study Tip: Remember the required fields for each type of notary certificate and which one they belong to.
