Married couples renewing vows in Las Vegas can get certificate
If there was only one emblem of a Sin City marriage ceremony, it must be an appearance by “the King.”
“We wanted to do a Vegas wedding and have Elvis present and do our ceremony,” Brooke Siegert said.
Except Siegert, 31, and husband Jared Duval, 35, got hitched two weeks ago in Stillwater, Minnesota, along the state’s eastern border.
But on Thursday, Clark County officially introduced the Certificate of Vow Renewal from inside the Marriage License Bureau, which allows married couples to commemorate the “post-wedding” wedding, of sorts.
“What they want to do is come here and have their Las Vegas wedding, but they’ve already been married, and so we have to turn them away and so we have nothing to give them,” county Clerk Lynn Marie Goya said. “Now we do.”
Goya said the bureau typically receives requests from about 150 married couples a year seeking a document to memorialize their Las Vegas wedding vows. The new certificate, which soft-launched on Dec. 1 and has been issued to about a dozen couples so far, is not official or legally binding.
“It’s a great memento and a great souvenir for these couples,” Goya said.
It provides how long the couple has been married and the location of their vow renewal ceremony, and it’s stamped by the clerk’s office.
A certificate costs $21, county spokesman Dan Kulin said.
In 2017, more than one of every 25 marriages in the U.S. occurred in Clark County, officials say, and wedding-related visits generated more than $2 billion in economic activity.
The bureau issues roughly 80,000 licenses annually.
Siegert and Duval flew into Las Vegas on Thursday and were called to Window 1 in the Marriage License Bureau to receive and sign their certificate. Their ceremony is Friday.
“I thought this is what you did in Vegas,” Duval joked.
Siegert viewed the celebration as more unique.
“Not all people go to Vegas and get married,” she said. “I think a lot of people do the more traditional thing and have a big ceremony and this is something different. I think it’s something new (that) people should experience.”
Contact Shea Johnson at sjohnson@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0272. Follow @Shea_LVRJ on Twitter.
