Still looking for that birth certificate

[mikefocke]

that matches the time and place on the birth certificate? How would someone be so foresighted as to go to all that trouble for some possible benefit 40+ years later?

I used to work for the Bureau of Vital Statistics in a different state and the newspaper announcements were culled from the hospital lists the hospitals sold to the papers. It was a simple world back then with no worries about privacy.

A birth certificate paper form was filled out by the hospital (or midwife or doctor or witness) (hand written in certain eras) and submitted to the bureau and was in two parts, one with medical info that was separated and used for statistical studies. The other contained the personal data. The original was filed in a book and a hand written entry in a huge ledger book was made as the index into which book and what page the certificate was filed under. It was filed under the last name. Lots of fun trying to figure out from the handwriting of the person recording the name in the ledger what the name was. Then if you were lucky the original was still readable and the ink had not faded. Some in quill pen dipped in ink.

A copy of the certificate was made by holding the original certificate and typing the critical info into a fancy looking form. Today, all computerized.

Curiously there were different public access rules for a birth certificate and a death certificate.

So there could be several things that all match...the original certificate, the ledger/index (the Hawaii equivalent...whatever it is) and the newspaper announcement. The later is public. The former aren't which is why the governor is a reasonable person to answer the question of do they exist and match and look contemporaneous to the event claimed. Of the three, the ledger would be the hardest to fake in my state because the data was entered in the order received indexed only by last name's first few letters. No computer nicely sorted things back in the olden days folks.