Searching for an officiant, where to even start?

MCmeow · May 2016

I feel like this is the trickiest portion of wedding planning so far. These are individual people with similar jobs and there's so many of them. How do you even narrow down choices? It's not like a venue or florist where you like the design or style of the place... Kinda lost. How did you guys find your officiant? How did you make your choice?

OurWildKingdom · May 2016

Our search was pretty easy. FW is a veteran and active with our city's VA. She's good friends with one of the chaplains and asked her to do the ceremony. The chaplain is United Church of Christ and used to doing nondenominational and secular ceremonies (FW is Episcopalian, I'm an atheist), so she was a natural. We're inviting her FW (they're getting married a month before us), and her daughter to the wedding as well.

Pinksatin91016 · May 2016

I think it's just like everything else: you already know someone you want to use, you ask people,or you start searching online. I didn't know anyone who could do it so I researched online and found one.

charlotte989875 · May 2016

Start with whether you want a religious or secular ceremony. If religious and you don't have a regular church, talk to friends, relatives, family in the area. We were married in a family-members church that we don't attend and they were perfectly happy to do our ceremony. If secular again ask around. If you have relatives or family members that know judges or magistrates talk to them. If not you can call town or city halls directly or email to see which judges/magistrates/officials do out of office services.

Also, if you're using a vendor that does a good number of weddings they may even have officiants that they recommend. If you having a venue coordinator ask them as well.

ernursej · May 2016

Not religious so using a marriage commissioner. I googled marriage commissions in our city and found several and then started to narrow things down. I also put out a Facebook post asking for recommendations from friends and that helped as well. FI and I ended up meeting with the 2 front runners (based on seeing their websites and recommendations from friends) and then chose the one that we liked the best. I didn't have to do reference checks on either as both were used by several friends.

SP29 · May 2016

You can start by asking around to people you know, if they recommend somebody. Otherwise, google.

Our officiant is a minister who frequently performs secular services. My grandparents know him through church, and also had him perform a family friend's funeral. My grandma recommended him, and I looked him up online and found he had a website for all the religious and secular services he provides. Worked out well for us, I was worried about my grandma recommending a minister (I believe he is a United minister), as we do not practice any religion, but he was very open and flexible and let us design the ceremony the we wanted/ were comfortable.

MCmeow · May 2016

We're the first of our close friends to get married and my older family members were married outside of the country so there's no recommendations to ask for =\ we're looking for a non-religious officiant, I like the idea of asking City Hall. Since we're from NYC there's a crazy amount of options, it's hard to even narrow down the ones we should email when the descriptions are identical haha. I guess this will be a task we should spend a full Saturday on.

[Deleted User] · May 2016

MCmeow said:

We're the first of our close friends to get married and my older family members were married outside of the country so there's no recommendations to ask for =\ we're looking for a non-religious officiant, I like the idea of asking City Hall. Since we're from NYC there's a crazy amount of options, it's hard to even narrow down the ones we should email when the descriptions are identical haha. I guess this will be a task we should spend a full Saturday on.

Do you have a friend who would do it? They can get ordained online through the Universal Life Church. There may be some extra hoops to jump through for your county, but the ordination (when I did it four years ago) cost all of $7. That's an option if you have a sibling or cousin or friend who is okay with public speaking and would take on that responsibility.

MCmeow · May 2016

adk19 said:

MCmeow said:

We're the first of our close friends to get married and my older family members were married outside of the country so there's no recommendations to ask for =\ we're looking for a non-religious officiant, I like the idea of asking City Hall. Since we're from NYC there's a crazy amount of options, it's hard to even narrow down the ones we should email when the descriptions are identical haha. I guess this will be a task we should spend a full Saturday on.

Do you have a friend who would do it? They can get ordained online through the Universal Life Church. There may be some extra hoops to jump through for your county, but the ordination (when I did it four years ago) cost all of $7. That's an option if you have a sibling or cousin or friend who is okay with public speaking and would take on that responsibility.

We were going to do that but it's not allowed in NYC. That would've been wonderful because we prefer a friend or family member to do it. Two of them are ordained online and practically begged us (they love public speaking and were trying to compete for the role haha) before we read the NYS law =\

MCmeow · May 2016

Whoops I think I was wrong^ I got confused because an article said some Down-State NY counties don't recognize the universal life church. But those counties are all in Long Island. I'll research some more but I think we can ask family to officiate after all. If any NY brides know something different...
Even so, after this post I started copy/pasting the same message to maybe 30 non-religious officiants so far. Only a handful are close to our price range, most are close to $1k (wtf why must this be the most expensive city I'm not rich!). So that solved the problem of this whole post because I have limited choices anyway, haha.

OurWildKingdom · May 2016

How's the search going?

MCmeow · May 2016

OurWildKingdom said:

How's the search going?

It's a little frustrating. I ended up messaging about 35 officiants, which wasn't so bad. I just wish things here weren't so much more expensive than the rest of the country. People assume NY=rich people, but no, rich people mostly move here, but poor people grow up here! Most officiants are quoting about $1000 which we didn't expect at all. Only a handful were affordable. I don't blame them, the cost of living here is crazy high.

So I did another look of the NYC law on officiants ordained online and we believe they are valid. So maybe my cousin can be our officiant afterall. It's tricky wording so I emailed the city clerk directly (Waiting for a response), but we've seen officiants offer services who are ordained by the Universal life church, so I assume it's allowed.

Searching for an officiant, where to even start?

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