CASE STUDY: Why I Can't Prove When I Was Born

So, as many of you know, when I first started my tree I made a lot of newbie mistakes.  That was one of the driving forces for me to create this blog.  Now that I've watched a few hundred videos and I am starting to better understand the methodology for doing genealogy, re-doing my tree seemed to be a smart idea.  I'm not scrapping everything and starting over, but I am going back to the beginning and re-reviewing the work I've done and making corrections where needed.  Although I'm fairly confident in the actual data I have in my tree, I'm also very confident that my citations are crap or non-existent and there is absolutely no proof of anything using the GPS (Genealogical Proof Standard).

movie-clapper-icon_500x500 by Ilya Sedykh is licensed under a 

Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0).  
No alterations to image - www.flickr.com

Take Two  

Starting with myself, it seemed reasonable to try to prove when I was born first.  Since I had technically already done this research and already had supporting documents, I skipped over a few of the normal steps on my research process list.  If you read my previous post, I jumped down to step 6: Make Note of Your Findings as this seemed to be where things went wrong the first time around.

Documenting Sources

Looking to see what documents were in my database, it turned out that I had a birth certificate, a baptismal certificate, marriage license, and a notation on the US Public Records Index.  I used a tool called Evidentia to record source records and citations for each of these using templates available in that application.

Analysis

Thinking this would be a cut and dried case, the first document I grabbed was my birth certificate.  I made a list of all the information listed in the document - namely my name, the names of my parents, the date on which I was born and the city and state where I was born.  Seems pretty clear and the information answers my question directly.  Done!  Right?  Well, not so fast.  I hit a problem - what I thought was my birth certificate was only a certificate of birth registration.  The only signature on this registration is the local registrar's who likely did not witness my birth.  There is no notation on the document to show who the informant was for my birth.  I checked my other documents and I don't have my actual birth certificate so I'm going to have to request a copy.  So, based on this registration alone, I cannot prove when I was born.

Since it will take some time to get the birth certificate copy, I looked to the other documents I had gathered.  Before I moved on though, I took another look at the birth registration and it was filed only 11 days after the date of birth noted and it is a certified copy so given that it is a government document, it does provide some evidence of my date of birth.  The next document I had was my baptismal certificate that noted my date of birth.  However, the witnesses who signed my baptismal certificate did not necessarily witness my birth also, so that is not proof.  The baptism did occur only 22 days after the noted date of birth though which is consistent with practices for baptisms in the church so it's reasonable that I was baptized as a baby.  Again, supportive but not conclusive evidence.

My marriage certificate was based on a form I filled out and I used that birth registration as proof of my birth for that purpose and it was accepted since it's a certified copy.  Since the birth information is fruit from the same tree, the marriage certificate can't really help me at all.

The last item is just an index and there is no way to tell from what original document the information in it is derived, so that doesn't really help at all either.

Resolving Conflicts

Tug of War by Robert Clemens is licensed under a 

Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-ND 2.0).  

No alterations to image - www.flickr.com

Luckily for me, while the documents I have are definitive proof of my date of birth, they all have one thing in common.  They report the same date.  So, even the items that are not very helpful from a proof perspective, like the Public Record Index, still at least support and give credence to the other documents as it reports the same date.

Conclusion

So, for now, my conclusion is that I can not definitively prove when I was born.  I did note the steps I went through above and stated that I believe the date of birth noted on the registration is correct.  I noted my next steps are to request and obtain a copy of my birth certificate from the county vital records office.  I can not complete my conclusion until that document is reviewed in conjunction with my other documents.  If it were to say that I was born a month earlier, then there would be a major conflict to deal with and it would be a more powerful indicator of the date if it is signed by my parents and/or a hospital physician.  So, for now I can't prove when I was born.

I hope walking through this situation will help other newbies like me begin to understand the importance of using the GPS.  While it may seem a little silly, especially using myself as an example, the process should be the same for my own records as it is for any of my ancestors.  If I were to overlook something like this while researching an ancestor, I could end up with the wrong person in my tree and spend a lot of time and money researching someone else's family.  And worse, with the ease of sharing information online, someone else could potentially merge my bad data with theirs and that would cause them to go down the wrong path also.  My hope is that writing up these type of cases will help prevent others from ending up in this situation.