Visas

Applying for Visas is a strenuous process on many levels. You are required to lay yourself at the feet of some of the most bureaucratic processes in the world. And these processes decide your future; in our case, a fairly large portion of our future! People who roll around with British and US passports do not, I don't think, fully understand the energy that must be sunk into the process.

Research begins when you are a child. Youngsters, aged 10 and up are overheard at braais and dinner parties discussing the merits of applying for a Schengen visa through French or Swedish routes. "Plan your trip to start in Stockholm," they say, "the Swedish embassy is much easier to deal with." Stories of South Africans who were awarded 10-year, multiple entry visas to Europe blaze through social circles. People who have been successful in their applications are interrogated relentlessly: "How do you qualify for an Ancestry visa for the UK?", "Why is it easier for a partner to get a dependent visa on an ancestry application than a British passport?" "Must we be married?" "What's the difference between a Tier-2 working visa and a Points-Based Settlement Visa?" And on and on it goes!

Once I had established through word of mouth informants that I qualified for an Ancestry Visa (due to my grandparents being born in the UK), I began the next phase of the process: making sense of the Gov.uk website and the various visas that are available. It must be added at this point, that no visa research is complete without hours and hours spent on forum sites. In fact, once the preliminary work had been done on the official sites, I reverted almost entirely to forums.

We decided to save money and apply for our visa without using an agent. I would not recommend this route to my worst enemy. I made up for that money that we saved by spending every waking moment worrying about the supporting documents I needed to have, figuring out which forms to fill in, making sense of the different costs that needed to be paid and phoning friends for advice.

BUT for anyone stupid enough to decide to take on applying for an Ancestry Visa application without an agent, I am going to write a post about how I did it. Since we are still waiting on a decision, I will only publish my personal "how to" guide, if we are successful in our application - hold thumbs please!