Still looking for that birth certificate

[mikefocke]

a scan of the top of the 1960's forms that most health departments were using around that time. (I worked in the DC Dept of Health, Bureau of Vital Statistics during that time period during the summers).

Even this is only a picture of the original, not the original itself. And only the top part of the form as the bottom part was removed and used for statistical analysis and only contained health data relating to the parents in any case.

A typical procedure would be for the birth to occur, a hospital worker to interview the mother and then type up the certificate, then the typed certificate to be brought to the mother for signature, then routed to the doctor for signature, then sent to the Dept of Public Health where the number in the top right would be assigned via a rubber stamp. Then an entry would be made in an index to allow a search to reveal the file number that would allow retrieval of the certificate. The dates in this picture seem to show that that process flow was followed.

Recall that in those days we didn't use computers so everything was done by hand. In our office, even the index was a hand written ledger book about 30 by 30 inches alphabetized by the last name so you'd go to the Smith page and then look by the dates and then look up the certificates in paper books where they were filed in the order they were received by the year and certificate number.

All of that information has been extracted and computerized now and I have no idea if they retained the original paper after digitizing everything. I would hope they did as I know the handwritten ones were a devil to decipher and sometimes we would huddle around with a magnifying glass debating the spelling of a word. Sometimes we had to use the applicants guidance to help us interpret the writing.

I say all this to provide some background for those not familiar with the processes back then and to say that it does look consistent with practices at the time.