I come across a lot of ephemera – paper and documents – at auction, but I’ve never come across anyone’s birth certificate.
Maybe it’s not the type of document parents keep along with the baby photos or recordings of first words or steps. It’s a state document that we ask for when we need it.
Birth certificates came to my mind this morning because today is my birthday, and I actually have a “certified” copy of my birth certificate (it looks like a clipped version with very basic information). I think I may have needed it to get my Social Security card for a summer job after my freshman year in college – the issue date is 1970. I have both the Social Security card and the birth certificate in the same folder in my file cabinet.
I’m a baby boomer, born in the 1950s in the great Southern state of Georgia, and the information recorded on the birth certificate reflected the times:
Color: Col.
It was the 1950s and this was Georgia. I’m not sure why it doesn’t say “Negro” rather than “Colored.”
Did you know that birth certificates in this country are only about 100 years old? Births were first recorded in the 1900s, and before then they went unrecorded or some family member recorded them in Bibles.
The first birth certificates were issued for tax purposes, among other things, according to Wikipedia. Births were registered with churches, a practice that endured into the 19th century. Births, marriages and deaths were first recorded in the United Kingdom in 1837, and government agencies were required to start keeping birth records in 1853.
Birth certificates are also important in this country because they officially prove our citizenship. At least they should, unless you’re the president of the United States and a few loose cannons don’t think you were actually born in Hawaii. President Obama’s birth certificate proves that he was born here, which really doesn’t matter since his mother was a natural-born U.S. citizen and thus, so is he.
Wikipedia also noted that for nearly 50 years, the U.S. Census Bureau designed the birth-certificate forms and kept the records nationally before the U.S. Public Health Service took it over in 1946.
For black people, birth records of our ancestors are few and far between. Maybe some were recorded in Bibles or kept in someone’s memory, but most are lost. There are the Census records, though.
Back in 1989, I checked Census records in the National Archives in Philadelphia to see what I could find for a family reunion newspaper. I found records of the family of my mother’s father at the archives in Philadelphia, but I was never able to find records about her mother’s side of the family. The information below was taken from the Census records. It showed the birth dates of the parents and children (The last child was born after the Census was taken).
The 1900 Census records showed that my grandfather’s parents were born during slavery, got married and remained married for 17 years. They had eight children who were born between 1886 and 1900. He was born in April 1852 and she in March 1855. His parents were from Georgia and he was born there. Rebecca’s father was from Georgia and her mother was from South Carolina.
I wish I knew and could find more. People who throw away all those records and photos that I see at auction are tossing away treasures.
