I’ve just received a bit of unexpected information.
So, long story short, I needed a copy of my birth certificate. All my life I’ve got by with an extract that was over 30 years old, but I lost it, so applied for a copy of the full original.
It just arrived, and it lists a brother that I’ve never known about. My older sister is listed and her age given, and then the unknown brother is listed as deceased.
I guess either my sister had a twin or an older brother. Or maybe I had a twin.
Has anyone here been in a similar situation of finding out about deceased siblings from your birth certificate?
Did you ask questions?
Did you respect your parents privacy, and not say anything?
If you are a parent, have you told your kids about previous babies you lost?
I guess it’s none of my business seeing as no one ever mentioned it to me. On quite a few occaisions I have asked my mom if I had any brothers that she may have misplaced or adopted out, but she has always denied any exist. I suppose she hasn’t really lied, but she could have just said yes, you had a brother, but he died at birth, or whatever. I guess she doesn’t want to talk about it - she knew I’d ordered this copy of my certificate, and she still didn’t say anything.
As a side issue, because now I’m curious, for a person to be named and included on birth and death records, do they have to be alive for any amount of time? Say that a baby is stillborn, do they issue a birth and death certificate?
I don’t know the answer to your question, but I’ve never seen a birth certificate that lists siblings. Mine doesn’t. Maybe your mother didn’t realize siblings would be on there.
Full birth certificates here list the parents names and the names of previous children and their age when you were born. Always have back to the early 1900’s at least.
My (now ex) wife and I had a still born before our kids were born. It doesn’t show up on their BC’s simply because it’s birth was never registered. As it never drew breath, it wasn’t able to be registered as being born even if we’d wanted to.
No dramas in my case about our kids knowing though, their mum made sure they knew all about it, ad nauseum.
My daughter’s two now, and I mention her would’ve-been-older-brother to her in her presence occasionally, and we have photos of him (he died at 12 days) in our house and her grandparents house, so she’ll just gradually be aware of him, and it won’t be a big shock.
He’s not mentioned on her birth certificate, no siblings are listed here in Scotland.
We have pictures of our deceased son and occasionally mention him. A four-year-old can’t really understand these things, so he’s just the brother who “lives in the sky.”
Our son was issued both a certificate of live birth and a death certificate, which apparently they don’t do for stillborn children.
When I was growing up, our neighbors had a child how died as a baby, and they had some pictures around the house. They just said that one of their children died, and it wasn’t a big deal.
It seems sort of surprising that your parents didn’t say anything, and it’s interesting that you asked your mother the question about misplacing a kid. That never occurred to me to ask my mother.
My mom lost two twin girls before my older sister, myself and my two younger sisters were born.
My youngest sister was also a twin with my deceased brother, whom I never met (died 3 days after birth).
I’ve known all their names since I was small, my mother never held the deaths of my 3 siblings from the rest of us, and while the news in hindsight is sad and tragic, I’ve never known anything different and still a bit too young to understand what was going on when my mom came home with my baby sister.
My mother said she had a pretty bad mental breakdown after, so I suppose that might really weigh in to the factor of someone suffering such grief not ever bringing it up or telling her other kids, but as far as myself and my sisters, learning the tragedy from a young age, you just take them as sad, but sort of disassociated facts being so young; if I had learned today I actually had two sisters and a brother that passed not too long after birth, I could imagine the surprise.
My children would know about their deceased siblings, if they had any, 'cause I’m just not good at keeping secrets. I also think the loss of a child changes a person and the family dynamics forever, and the kids have a right to know about something that affects them so profoundly. Gives 'em a head start in therapy.
In my father’s family the children were born boy, girl, girl, girl, boy. My father was the youngest. But for some reason he was given his father’s first name (but not the middle name) and not his older brother. Decades later he found out that there was a first child named after his father that died in infancy.
That’s what I’ve been thinking about today. I cannot recall any memories of being told, or overhearing, anything about this. My best guess is someone may have mentioned it when I was very young and it just barely got retained. I don’t know enough about memory formation in very young children to say if that’s a posibility though.
Other than when I was young, I have asked again several times, but for a bit of a goofy reason. I live in a small city, and keep being mistaken for someone else. Some poor dude in town looks like me. It was only last month that a taxi driver mistook me for ‘Ben’. A few days later a guy at the supermarket did the same. When I saw mom again, I asked her about any brothers, maybe a twin that she might have forgotten about. As always, she said no. I kind of feel like a knobhead now for bringing up something she seems to not want to talk about.
I just went through getting a new birth certificate as well. I happen to have a certified copy of the form my Mom completed to register me. And there is a question aslking how many live births the mother has previously had.
But I remember they lost a son, I was maybe 4 or five, so I wasn’t surprised to see an ‘live birth’ listed.
I didn’t see any need to bring up the miscarriage I had between my two children. The oldest was only about two years old when it happened, so there would have been no point at the time. When they were in their late teens I told it to them as part of a discussion about general medical issues in the family.
My first child, my only daughter, died when she was four months old due to a genetic syndrome.
My next child, my oldest son, was born about 18 months later. I have two younger sons after him.
We’ve always kept pictures of my daughter around and we’ve talked about her from before they were too little to understand. That way it’s part of their story and there’s no big moment where it is revealed, “You have a dead sister”.
Still I don’t know if we’ve done it right. The kids never mention her much and I don’t know how it all settles in their little heads.
My parents had a son who died at the age of six. I was born two years later. It was never a secret - there are two brothers who were older than him, so they lost their baby brother. I and my younger siblings knew about the deceased one our entire lives - there were plenty of pictures of him in photo albums, and his final school picture had pride of place on the family portrait wall. I even picked his name as my Catholic confirmation name.
My mother had a set of twins born prematurely who died. It’s always just been a thing we knew about. She didn’t wallow in it, but it was just always out there. She had 7 kids (including two sets of twins) in 6 years.
My oldest niece was killed in a car accident when she was just over 2 years old. Her younger sister was born one month after the accident, and another niece came along 18 months later. So they never met their oldest sister, but they do know about her and we all have pictures of her around. Sometimes they ask questions about her, and it’s good to talk about her (although sometimes a little awkward, depending on the question).
Depending on where and when you were born, it can be included. New York birth certificates used to list the number of live births the mother previously had on a child’s birth certificate. I’ve never seen any names or dates listed, but which number child you are is very clear.
I have a friend who always lists his baby brother who only lived 5 days among “family”. His mother wrote a very well-known book about dealing with losing a child.
My brother killed himself a few months before I was born, it wasn’t exactly like they lied about his existence but he was rarely mentioned even in appropriate moments and they lied and told me he died in a car accident. I’m not sure I ever confronted my mom about it but she might still insist he did.
