Legal Question in Family Law in Texas

i am in the state of Texas. i have been informally married to a woman for 9 years, we have lived together as husband and wife the whole time, we have two child that are ours(we are the biological mother and father), we have expressed the want for a more formal marriage, (she had even proposed to me, asking me to marry her, infront of her mother in 2010), we have always intoduced ourselves as husband and wife, people have known us to be married everywhere we have lived. she has also filed her original aplication for ssi/ssdi with me listed as spouse(i am not sure if i made it on the paper work as spouse, because it would not have affected the benefits in any positive way)

i also know that in Bastrop county, texas, that to declare an infromal marriage i would go to the county clerks office and fill out their form for such

what my questiion is, is if i wanted to declare this marriage by myself, without her being present, do i file my declaration in the same way as i would if she were there with me. i have a Declaration that i typed up myself from "American Jurisprudence Pleading and Practice Forms" p.162. This only requires one signature and i was going to file it with copies of (1) a letter from the IRS that shows that we had filed jointly and that they had taken our return for my child support, and (2) a copy of a hand writen piece of paper that she had writen herself that state the marriage date as the day we moved in together. Also a statement stating that we concidered ourselves married, and that she had filed her initial application with the SSI listing me as spouse.

does this sound like what i need to do or is there something else......or less that i should do? And, in a lawyers opion, would this be acceptable in bastrop County, Texas?

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