After having read this article about a teenaged girl who’s having problems proving her existence due to her fundamentalist parents having home schooled her, and having no records of her existence, a question arose in my mind. When Social Security first began, the older people who were starting to get their Social Security accounts created were largely born at home, with little schooling and little record of their existence. How did they prove their existence?
I think you have a mistaken idea of how common record keeping was in the late 1800s. Most people would have had christening records from a church, marriage certificates, military service records, birth records recorded in family bibles, and so forth. Researching my family history, I have almost always been able to find records of birth dates going back at least until the mid-1800s.
Ida May Fuller, born on a farm in 1874, was the first Social Security recipient in 1940. By 1874, record keeping wasn’t bad in most of the country. There may have been some rural people who had problems, but that was probably exceptional.
Actually schooling was common–though it was usually only through the 8th grade so there were definitely school records which could be used.
Most births and marriages were recorded in the family Bible and that was good enough.
That would depend on what country you where born in . My dad was born in Russia in the 1800 and no one in his family knew what day they were born . My dad had 3 birth dates , his dad did this so he could have his son work to help support the family
in USA. My dad picked out this own birthday .
In my basement I have a crumbling old Hungarian church document dated 1903 that lists my grandmother being born in 1892. That would have been enough proof to count as a birth record.
Back in the day (before identity fraud), the government tended to be much more lenient about what documents were acceptable.
For example, when one of my relatives wanted a passport in the 1920s, he got his older sister to write out an affidavit that she was around when he was born in 1865, and then a letter from his employer that he was a good guy. One passport, coming up. That passport would then have been good enough to prove his age and identity had he lived until Social Security came along.
In fact, I’m not sure that SocSec was all that picky about proving age and identity when it first started. You needed to prove your age when it was time to claim benefits, but my understanding (sorry, no cite) is that obtaining a card required nothing more than the applicant’s sworn declaration.
It was World War II and the defense plants that really led to a surge of people seeking governmental proof of who they were. For national security reasons, only U.S. citizens were allowed to be employed in war work; every state was deluged with residents seeking proof of citizenship, and every state set up a process to use family bibles or school registrations or affidavits or whatever to obtain a delayed birth certificate.
That certificate was then good enough when the worker retired and wanted to begin receiving benefits. If they didn’t obtain one during the war, the same processes could be used later. Here in Kansas, e.g., the historical society in the 1960s and 70s had a steady stream of requests to look up residents in the old state censuses of 1905 or 1915 or age verification, to be submitted to the Social Security Administration. By then, of course, most people also had a long trail of records (tax returns, drivers licenses, etc.) proving they’d been around for awhile.
Still, when they immigrated some date or age would have been entered into the record. Even if this wasn’t the actual date they were born on, for the purposes of Social Security this would de facto determine their age.
My mother (born in a farmhouse in 1915) was one of three sisters - somehow, her birth certificate had her name incorrectly.*
There were letters from her sisters stating that, for her entire life, she had been called “XY”, not “XU” as one the certificate.
There was also a corrected birth certificate.
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- I’m guessing a local doctor knew of the pregnancies in the area, and would stop by.
This must be a typo?
I got my SS card when I was 14. I needed it for work. I was afraid they wouldn’t give one unless you were 16. So, I fudged my birth date two years. This was in the 60’s. So, apparently they didn’t ask for documentation.
This served as a reminder to me: I got mine in the 1960s, under similar circumstances. IIRC, I got my SS application at the Post Office and just mailed it in, and had my card in hand a few weeks later.
In England, back in the 60s, I knew a guy who had no official identity.
He was born during the war in his grandmother’s home which was a tiny cottage with no connection to the outside world apart from a footpath. His mother promptly legged it once he was born and was never heard of again. His grandmother bought him up and never sent him to school and never registered his birth, possibly for the shame of it.
At fourteen he started work with a local blacksmith and eventually became a farrier which is what he was doing when I met him. He drove a van without benefit of a licence and worked only for cash.
It was the tax man that got him. He went to a county agricultural show adn, after a few beers, was encouraged to enter a horse-shoeing competition, which he duly won. This got him 100 pounds as a prize and his picture in the paper. HMRC saw it and investigated.
It took about three years before it all got resolved and it was all pretty amicable once he payed his back taxes - goodness knows what would happen these days. He would probably have been arrested as an illegal immigrant.
I got mine in the early 1970s at age about 14. It was definitely before I got my driver’s license. IIRC I just filled out the form and sent it in. No proof of anything was required.
Even as late as the 1980s parents didn’t need the kids to have an SSN to claim them as tax exemptions. So most folks got their number as they approached the age of getting their first job. Employers did need all employees to have SSNs to do tax withholding.
I recall the hue and cry when the IRS changed tack and demanded that all [del]tax exemptions[/del] children have SSNs to be tax deductible. It was allegedly to prevent widespread tax fraud where both divorced parents claimed all the same kids as exemptions. The usual paranoid fringe saw it as yet another step towards national ID documents, universal surveillance, and, inevitably, universal slavery.
See “Catch Me If You Can” or read the (true) book it was based on.
Until the advent of inkjets and laserjets, the average person did not have access to anything more complex than a typewriter for documents. Many documents until the 90’s were preprinted forms with details filled in by typewriter, and later by mainframe line printers. Unless (like the book) you had access to fancy printing equipment, anything that looked pre-printed seemed far more official than we accept today. Color printed form - obviously real?
(The “Catch Me…” story revolves around the fellow’s ability to fake things like payroll cheques, and how trusting of such printed items that people used to be when they were presented in the right setting)
Finally, this was not as big a deal. Identity theft was a lot less of an issue when all business was done face-to-face and money had to be moved by cheque, and credit was a rarity unless the local bank already knew all about you.
(Amusing anecdote- Canada’s equivalent was the Social Insurance Number. The place where I worked in the 80’s hired a lot of people who only lasted a year or two. In the 80’s we started getting mail from the Revenue Canada about people “this person from now on will use this SIN number.” A trick in the Maritimes was to apply for multiple numbers, so they could work on one to collect work credit for Unemployment Insurance while collecting UIC on another number. At some point the department started computer matching and reconciling names, numbers, birth dates, etc.
Similarly, there was the popular trick of assuming an identity (i.e. Day of the Jackal) by finding a dead child’s name and applying for birth certificate, then passport, etc. As part of the anti-terrorism drive, governments are slowly closing down that loophole by matching birth and death records. From what I’ve read, it doesn’t work any more.)
I believe that poster left out the ‘s’ after ‘1800’, as in “born in the 1800s”, probably the late 1800s. You could have a parent born 1890, you be born in 1930, and presumably still be posting at 85.
Not just divorced parents both claiming the same kid but people claiming totally fictitious kids. There were literally well over a million fewer exemptions claimed from one year to the next when that went into place.
I just went to a locall SS office (I was probably about 15) and filled out a form, got a card. I don’t think I swore anything. The only time I used my birth certificate was when I got a passport. They were much more trusting in those days. My grandparents were all born in Russia and Lithuania. I suppose there were immigration records, for what they were worth, but I think they just accepted their statements. They didn’t know their birth dates anyway.
The business of tax fraud is real enough. My sister was born in late January and my father claimed her on the previous year’s tax return. Too late to do anything about it now.
From what I remember of my school history class when FDR was trying to get SS pass one of the arguments against it was the number could be used as an National Identity card. A promise was made that it would never be used for identity other than collecting SS taxes and making SS payments. My original SS card had printed on it in bold letters not to carry the card on your person at anytime. I got a replacement card a few years ago with the note on the card saying the card should be carried on your person at all times.
Think of how many forms that you fill out that include your SS number. How is a credit check run, what number is used. Use a credit card? Call with a problem with your account and what number do they ask you for to identify yourself?
SS has become your national identity number. Will we have a day when we are stopped through out the day to present our papers? I don’t know but the base is already set there.
It is required on anything related to finances (bank accounts, employment records, etc.) by the IRS, since they use it to check all your income for tax purposes.
Anyone else can ask for your SSN, but you don’t have to give it to them. (But they aren’t required to give you the service/product, either.)
Personally, I wish it WAS a national id number. It would be easier than keeping track of all these separate numbers everybody has assigned to me. And I believe it would be easier to catch fraud with a universal id number.