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THIS PAGE DETAILS THE BUREAUCRATIC PROCESS THAT HAS TO BE ENDURED WHEN A THAI WOMAN WISHES TO CHANGE HER NAME TO HER MARRIED-TO-A-NON-THAI NAME.
I'm British, my wife is Thai, we married in 2013 in the UK and we both wanted to officially change her surname/family name to mine.
To change the surname in their passport, a Thai has to first change the name in their ID card. This can only be done in Thailand at the district office or Ampur where they are registered.
I was travelling with my wife which made things a little more simple.(If I were not accompanying her the process would be slightly different. I'd have to get a form from the Thai Embassy in UK, which is an agreement for her to use my surname. The completed form would then have to be signed by a solicitor, and then by a Thai Embassy official. She'd need to take this form with her to Thailand)
BEFORE GOING TO THAILAND:
We had to sort out and deal with the following documents:
1.Send the Marriage Certificate to the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office to be legalised. This had to be booked in and paid for online on the legalisation section of the FCO website.(£30)
2. The newly certified Marriage Certificate has then to be officially translated into Thai. This has to be done by a certified translator. Official translators can be found listed on various Thai Consulate websites. Consulates themselves no longer offer a translation service (at least the Liverpool Consulate office doesn’t). I was fortunate in that one such translator lived only a couple of miles away.
3. The Marriage Certificate, which now had a big FCO sticker and stamp on the back, plus the translation was sent to the Thai Embassy in London to be legalised again.(£10)
That's the UK bit done.
In Thailand:
We took all the documents to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Bangkok. The documents had to be stamped (legalised) here first. The documents won't be accepted in the district office without this stamp (800 Baht).
We then travelled to her house in Surin to collect the family registration book which is usually kept at her family home.
Next a trip to the Ampur in the district office with the following documents:
At the Ampur they processed the documents and registered the fact that my wife is now married and wants to change her surname. They then processed a new ID card which was issued there and then.
Next we travelled with the new I.D. card, Marriage Certificate and her old passport documents back to Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Bangkok, to the passport issuing section.
The passport processing normally takes a few hours before a receipt is issued, along with information about when the new passport would be ready. (1000 Baht).
A few days later we would have been able to collect the new passport, all we would have needed this time was the receipt.
However, in our case we opted to have the new passport mailed out to our house address in Surin.
Well I did say it was bureaucratic, tedious and, frankly, a real pain. But that's the Thai way of things......
One useful addition came out of this process for me personally, which is extremely useful, was that I was able to apply for and be given a Thai I.D. Card of my own. You can only be granted this if your name is in the Family Registration Book.
This is a very handy thing to have as it gets you into events, parks, zoos, etc for the same price as a Thai. Also useful in hotels as you can just hand in your I.D. Card instead of your passport.
NB: Prices and costs mentioned were correct in 2015; no doubt they will have changed by the time this is read.
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