Your state may require you as a Notary Public to keep a journal of sequential acts, or it may not. It is a strong recommendation from me as the Senior Notary Adviser for 1NOTARYSCHOOL.COM that every Notary Public keep a journal. This journal will contain details of each notarization.
Your notary journal should not only contain acts you performed a notarization for, but also notarization acts that did not take place. The notary journal service as a check list for the proper performance of notarial acts. To help assure that the requirements for a good notarization are being meet all the blank spaces in your journal should be filled in with information pertaining to that notarization.
Some examples of this are:
- type of identification that was presented;
- serial number;
- issue and expiration date on the identification document.
- the type of notarization that was performed.
- what kind of document was notarized and how many pages were contained within the document.
- Most important is the original signature of the principal (document signer).
The original signature(s) proves beyond the satisfactory evidence, that the principal(s) appeared before the Notary Public. Your journal also has a space for special commits as well as a place for the principal(s) thumbprint.
A Notary Public should also have separate entries for each witness(es) in a credible witness(es) scenario, or an entry for the principal when the principal signs by mark.
Don’t be afraid to use the comment section on each entry. In this section you can note the relationship between the witness(es) and the document or the witness(es) and the principal(s).
The journal should be permanently bound. The reason for this is so pages cannot be permanently removed or pages added. The pages should also be numbered, along with each entry being consecutively numbered. Bond and numbered pages help to reinforce nothing has been tampered with.
Having recorded all of your notarizations and being able to prove each one was correctly performed, can help protect the Notary Public against catastrophic financial damages.
All it takes is just one claim of negligence and a poorly kept journal.
If you are called into court to testify about a document, your correctly kept journal is going to save you.
An example if this would be if an original certificate was removed from a document or was destroyed in some way, the Notary Public has his/her well kept journal to fall back on.
Your Journal helps by:
- giving a description of the document that was notarized.
- the facts of the notarization.
- who presented the document for notarization.
- if a loose certificate was used.
This information is instrumental in helping to prevent fraud.
What about if someone has issues with the principal's signature or the signature or the Notary Public?
- The journal will contain the information entered by the Notary Public to show that she/he preformed the signing.
- The journal will also have the wet ink signature of the document signer along with the information that established beyond doubt that the principal was who they claimed to be.
- Most important, it proves the principal appeared before the Notary Public, because of their wet ink signature, which appears in the Notary Journal
So in short, your journal is your Notary Public diary. I can’t remember what I ate for dinner last night, how does someone expect me to remember a notarization I performed five years ago? I can however, rest assure that I have imputed enough information in my notary journal to assist me if I was ever called into court to testify.
So can you?
Tune back on the 1st of September 2009 for more helpful information on maintaining your Notary Public Journal.
Kim
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