Certified vs Notary

I doubt it. I haven't heard of anyone using notarized copies. They will most likely want official government documents.

Who is applying? Is it you, your mother, or both of you? If it is just you, it's simple. For Phase 2, you won't have to worry about your mother's documents. You'll just turn in your birth and, if married, marriage certificates.

Your mother's Phase 2 is a bit more complicated. As I understand it, she will again need to turn in certified copies of her original and amended birth certificates as well as her adoption decree.

Thanks for the info guys. This is for phase 1. By documents that I already have I mean my birth certificate and my mother's birth certificate. I will need to order certified copies of those through the state I guess. The info on the adoption stuff for phase 2 is helpful, thanks for letting me know.

The documents we have received from the state of Washington simply have been stamped "certified copy". But it was mentioned that they might come signed and certified. I'm a little confused if I've received the correct type of certified document. 

I want to say thanks again to all that have helped me with my random questions. Phase 1 is progressing nicely for my mother, sisters and myself. We waited to do any work on phase 1 till we had the adoption decree for my mother because without that none of this would have come together. Now that we have started to look back into it we've found that our family, all the way back to my Luxembourg ancestor, lived in the same state, and two different counties, making the collection of documents quite a smooth process. Hoping that it will be able to be sent by the end of August and I'll be in the waiting pool with most of you! I'll keep y'all updated and if I have anymore petty questions I'll be sure to ask! haha.

I had ordered a "certified copy" of my passport and what they sent me was certified copies of my application for my passport. Not a copy of my actual passport info page. It did not seem like the sufficient document so I contacted someone at the Ministry of Justice in Lux. and they told me that a simple color photocopy would be sufficient. So basically you need to just use a scanner and make a copy of your passport page and have a notary sign it. Pretty simple, although certain states in the U.S. ( I'm assuming that's where you're from ) will do this differently. Some places will refuse to make a copy and sign it and blah blah. So there are a few different things you can do if they won't do that for you. One being, make your own copy and take it to them with your passport so they can see it is a copy of the original and they should sign it. If not, there are other options that I don't exactly remember but basically just have you typing up a statement saying that you made the copy and they are just signing it. Search " how to get a certified copy of a passport" one of the first pages to pop up has the rest of the info. If I have time later I will look for it and post a link.

No problem. Did they make the copy there for you? Or did you make a copy and take it with you? Just curious, as I said some places are eerie about making notarized copies of passports.