About Plymouth Rock Certificate Company

“ ... the dear, old friendship, ... shall grow older and dearer!”
	— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow The Courtship of Miles Standish

Remembering a tradition

Preserving a fine old custom for today and tomorrow

Plymouth Rock Certificate Company began as a true “mom and pop” enterprise. By happenstance, a meeting of four old friends — two real moms and two real pops — revived a tradition almost lost.

Here is how PRCC co-founder Fran Holden describes it:

“One evening in our home by the beach in Milford, Connecticut — years and miles from where we were married — we were having dinner with two old friends from Georgia. As we caught up on children and work, George mentioned that when he and Valerie were married (twenty-five years before, in Pennsylvania), every guest signed a large wedding certificate, as legal witness to the marriage.

“Valerie and George had the certificate framed, and they'd hung it on their living-room wall in each home they'd had. He said that over the years many people had commented on it: ‘I don’t even know where to find my wedding guest book, and you have all these memories on the wall,’ or, ‘I wish I had one of those from our wedding.’

“Chris and I decided to join forces with Valerie and George, to save a custom worth saving; we formed the Plymouth Rock Certificate Company.”

“We could not have done it if we'd been newlyweds,” says Chris Holden. “We wouldn't have seen the need. It takes a long-married couple, reminiscing, looking back over the years, savoring the good times and teaming up against the bad, to understand how much a wedding certificate can mean.”

Chris and Fran, already owners of a small business that specialized in communication, called upon their experience and expertise in design and printing to reproduce fine certificates in a traditional format. Soon PRCC was shipping wedding and anniversary certificates around the state, New England, and the nation.

Under the Holdens’ supervision, the wedding/anniversary certificate, while keeping its desirable old-fashioned qualities, has been updated for today's couples, in any type of ceremony. While it retains the ornate fonts and the parchment feel characteristic of the all-but-lost certificates of the 19th and early 20th centuries, it is now personalized for each wedding: it no longer has the blank lines of yesteryear's certificates but specifies the names of marriage partners and family members, the place of the union, and the name of the wedding officiator in beautiful calligraphic type.

The clerk who handcopied all official documents into fine copperplate — a mainstay of any American courthouse in years gone by — is gone. But now, Plymouth Rock Certificate Company is carrying on one fine old part of his tradition, to preserve in formal and lasting beauty the union of two people and two families.

Contact Information

Mailing Address:

Plymouth Rock Certificate Company
116A Research Drive
Milford CT. 06460
Phone: (800) 219-5144
Fax: (203) 877-8014

Please feel free to

Call us at 1-800-219-5144
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“Plymouth Rock — Quality that Speaks for Itself.”

Please allow two weeks to one month for completion and delivery