My mother did not have a birth certificate, having been born in the 20’s in the backwoods of Tennessee. In her 70’s I wanted to take her on a cruise but could not get her a passport as I had no proof she was a citizen of the US. It took several months, a really old bible, 3 people swearing she was born in Tennessee and one clerk in Nashville finally declaring that she believed us and filing a “new” birth certificate for her.
Yes, this actually happened within the last 30 years or so. I remember when my mother HAD to get my brother and me SSNs if they wanted us to count as tax deductions. It was sometime in the mid-80s.
The social security number is a bit of a red herring in this context. You don’t have to be a US citizen to get a US SSN and, conversely, you can be a US citizen without having have a US SSN.
If she had a christening record at her age that could have been presented as proof of citizenship. In Nevada and many states out West, christening records are used in lieu of having a certificate of live birth. This is due to the large Latino population who until the 1950s moved rather freely across the border.
While christening records are losing their “credibility” in the wake of 9/11, every government agency would likely accept such a record for anyone who born prior to 1975-1980. After that point, stating that there was no birth certificate might become a little sketchy and you’d probably have to provided multiple forms of ID and possibly notarized affidavits attesting to your citizenship.
No christening records that I knew of. Don’t even know what that is.
A baptismal certificate. It’s a certificate issued by a Christian priest/minister/preacher/pastor/deacon attesting to the fact that an infant was given the Christian sacrament of baptism. (Baptism involves sprinkling water on the subject or immersing the subject in water while saying a blessing for the purpose of removing original sin.) A copy will probably be retained in the church’s records and a copy may be given to the parents. Note that not all sects believe in infant baptism.
Which leads me to wonder, do Jewish mohels issue bris certificates? Or keep bris records?
I’ve got a birth certificate - somewhere - I think. I don’t remember anyone ever wanting to see it. I’ve got a driver’s license, of course, and people want to see that all the time.
When my baby girl was born, I thought they’d give me a birth certificate, but they refused. They said I had to blah blah blah building at at such and such place; which I haven’t done it yet. :eek: She’s now almost five.
I’ve never quite understood the point of the birth certificate. It says a baby was born at such and such place with a certain name. But it doesn’t have my picture on it, or my fingerprints. There’s nothing to prove I’m that baby, in other words.
This.
In fact, most parents were provided with this as it was evidence that the child had been christened/baptized if the family were to move to another diocese,parish,etc. These documents were closely held (and still are) and people used to them to open bank accounts, join the military even obtained passports.
The very first time that I saw one was in the military. One of my roommates had one instead of a birth certificate and he took it with him to obtain a civilian passport.
A birth certificate is not an identity document - there is no reason to suppose that a person waving a particular birth certificate in the air is the person who is named in the birth certificate.
What it is, though, is evidence that the person named in the certificate was born on a given date at a given place, and the named person’s parents are those listed in the certificate.
As far as estalbishing citizenship goes, for most people it’s a fairly signficant document. If you daughter ever needs to estalbish that she is a US citizen, and if the factor which qualifies her as a US citizen is that she was born in the US, she’ll need evidence that she was born in the US. That’s what her birth certificate will do.
Actually, it is considered to be among the most important of breeder documents and it, along with another confirming piece of documentation (an SS card, a drivers license, a military ID,etc) can allow a person to obtain other forms of ID, as well as open bank accounts and obtain employment.
This is why people who lose their birth certificates should file police reports about it and also perform a credit check upon themselves. They could be in store for a number of serious negative issues if the fail to do so.
Oh, it’s an important document, undoubtedly. It’s just not a particularly useful identification document. My birth certificate tells you where UDS was born, and when, and who his parents were, and what sex he was. But what it doesn’t contain is any information which would enable you reliably to identify UDS today - no current address, no physical description beyond gender (and even that may have changed), no photograph, no fingerprints. If somebody produces UDS’s birth certificate and says that it refers to him, you have only his word that it does.
I’m not sure why you would need to report the loss of a birth certificate to the police. Surely the birth certificate merely sets out what is contained in a particular entry in the register of births? As long as the register survives, its contents can be certified at any time. Can you not just apply to the relevant office for another certificate? Can you not apply for as many certificates as you want, or find convenient?
Which kind of answer’s the OP’s question about what happens if there was no supporting documentation at the time.
Exactly - as I said earlier, paper trail. A birth certificate may not prove who you are. A driver’s license may be fraudulent (especially if obtained before the rules were tightened after 9/11. You may have an incorrect SSN.
If you show up at a government office with a few of these documents, the odds are unless there are flags already out on your identity, the office can’t prove one way or another who you are. OTOH, if they are investigating a passport application, or investigating your past while you are awaiting trial, the authorities can dig deeper.
(What’s the recent movie with Penelope Cruz and Jason Statham, where she says “I checked your credit record, and you know what? You didn’t exist until 2 months ago.”) Each piece of paper is a brick in the wall - a piece of a puzzle. It proves with some reliability (or not) that as of a certain date, this person existed.
The birth certificate is the most useful - it shows that a particular person with a particular name began their life at a certain time. So far, I have not heard a lot of suggestions that this data is being created and faked at the source, Hawaii allegations notwithstanding.
Every time you interact with modern life, you leave a trail that can be checked. Birth, school, doctor and dentist, driver’s license, employment, marriage, divorce, church attendance, legal issues, buy or rent a home, banking, credit, IRS filings. You can skip one or several of these, but it is hard to skip a lot and a major effort to reach adulthood and miss them all.
In the case of the Tennessee passport applicant - she may not have had a birth certificate, but the story held together; likely - some of her friends did; records showed they all lived where they said they did going back decades; probably there were marriage records for her, and probably her parents, and her children’s birth records. And so on… so it’s conceivable that she would have been smuggled in from Ireland as an infant, but the most likely indication is she’s actually who she says she is. If the applicant had no records beyond 5 years ago, everything else required digging into records from Moldova or Iraq - well, dig more. (In fact, in those cases, there would be immigration records).
When I apply for a passport (Canada), they want a birth certificate, my name(s), address(es), employer, parents, etc., plus some references who know me. Basically, a set of starting points to validate the pieces of that puzzle.
You might be able to fake it in one instance. The example of the passport applicant above shows, however, that some documents they investigate more than others, especially after 9/11. Not having a crucial document likely is not the best way to avoid having them dig deeper to check other references.
I don’t know how the passport office works, but I assume they actually verify any birth certificate submitted against official state records.
Another important point - every time you do something - apply for a passport, driver’s license, etc. - you add to that record, commit more detail to the record for that specific name.
Depends on how old you are-if you were born after the IRS began requiring SS numbers for dependents (around 1987) , then your mother got the application before she left the hospital. If you are older than that , you got a SSN when you needed it - either to meet the IRS requirement, to open a bank account or to get a job. But it wasn’t a matter of anyone refusing- you simply didn’t apply for one until you needed it.
When I got my driver’s license back in the 80’s one of the acceptable forms of identification was a “Cradle Roll” which is more or less a church writing down your name when you’re an infant. At least one friend of mine actually used that.
Right.
One of the things that were brought about with the rise in preoccupation with reliable ID, that got really intense after 9/11 but was already being discussed in relation to NAFTA-zone border-crossing issues, and that more recently had a spike in interest with the whole Voter-ID question, was that while your average legal immigrant probably has very carefully secured his official papers indicating his presence status, a huge amount of Natural Born Citizens essentially lead “undocumented” lives sort of on the “honor system”, with insufficient documents readily in their possession.
Yet even so, US public opinion has been very averse to the idea of creating one National Universal ID Document, preferring to rely on the paper trail method whenever actually interested in something that requires identity verification. One complication with this is the aforementioned decentralization of the civil registry in the US, where a lot of the information is managed at the county or municipal level, combined with the high mobility of the population. Someone’s baptismal certificate may be on file all the way across a whole continent and the would-be witnesses to your life may be scattered all across the different states.
Where you live today isn’t germane to the question which was asked. Even your drivers license doesn’t necessarily reflect where you “live.” I work contract in a number of states and while it may be legally necessary for me to obtain that state’s license, I never have. And I have never had an issue with the authorities because of this.
Even if I did, my license shows that my current address is a PO Box, not a physical location. While some states won’t allow that, mine will and I see no need to change it. Even the few times in the last 15 years when I received a ticket from the police they never commented upon the fact that my license didn’t have my home address on it.
Losing your birth certificate can make it easier for a person will ill-intent to obtain the documents necessary to impersonate you. If they encounter “errors” in your current address, they can simply state that they (pretending to be you) have simply moved from that address recently and forgotten to change/update it. And then they’ll change the address to whatever location that they choose.
If you have a birth certificate, an SS card and one or more forms of other ID (government or not) unless the authorities have a strong reason NOT to believe that you are who you are claiming to be, then you will be treated as being that person. If that person is a US citizen, then you’ll be deemed a citizen.
Pluses if you look similar to the person who you are impersonating.
This is the advantage of decentralized records - it is close to impossible to create a new ID without a lot of resources or power. All these data sources are separate and spread out, you need to create a lot more than one single infallible record. To get a birth certificate, it has to be for someone. If I use your identity to get a job, the IRS has tax records of where I was, and that will aid when the authorities try to sort things out. I might get a license in your name, but now they have my photo. Ditto for a passport - plus, once questions arise that passport is quickly flagged as suspect - making air travel difficult. and so on.
As a smooth-talking con artist, I might even manage to create a totally fictitious identity. But then, how will I get by the “no birth certificate” when it becomes necessary? Who will vouch for me? How would I fake school records, a likely fallback in absence of BC? Where are my parents, and unless I’m 80 years old, there must be a record of someone claiming me as a dependent.
“Peace Love Smith” might wander out of the backwoods undocumented, but the moment he tries to do anything in modern society he creates a paper trail.
It goes back to Abraham Lincoln’s principle - you can fool some of the people all of the time, or all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.
Depends how badly the state wants to verify your paper trail.
Umm…this not correct.
The decentralized nature of the US identity system means that any “mistakes” are not seen as being the result of fraud of identity theft, but as being errors in the system. If a conman was familiar with these, they could easily impersonate people for many years (or even decades) without causing any “blips” on the radar.
IRS records will only relate LEGAL jobs that you have had. If you are working “off-the-books” the IRS has no idea of what you are doing or where you are doing it. The cash that you are paid is fungible and it can only be traced with a great deal of effort.
if they have your photo…so what? The idea would be to impersonate someone who you would closely resemble or who you resembled at the time when you obtained the false ID. They then would have to prove that you are not “you” and that in fact, you are someone else. Unless you already have fingerprints and lately DNA in the system, this will be exceptionally hard. Especially since few career criminals are going to incriminate themselves after they have spoken with an attorney.
Also one does not need to be a “smooth talker”; in fact this would probably work against you. The more things that you can’t remember, the more truthful many stories seem. No one can exactly remember exact start dates of jobs unless they correspond with events in their personal lives and people rarely remember people who don’t make much of an impression upon them (like grade school principals for example)
People forget and memories fade.
That’s how life works.
A perfect example of this was James Whitey Bulger, the Boston organized crime figure. He was on the run for almost 20 years and he would have remained so had he and his companion not attracted the attention of a nosy neighbor. The authorities had no idea where he was and Bulger even bought weapons, traveled into Mexico and opened bank accounts using IDs he purchased from transients along the Santa Monica boardwalk.
He didn’t use any specialized methods; he simply lived a low-key lifestyle and only made a few waves. Had he not made this waves he almost certainly would still be free today
Back to the subject at hand: If you have the proper documentation in your possession, then it will be assumed that you are the person who you are claiming to be. Getting that documentation is, unfortunately, depressingly easy, even now after 9/11 and that’s why it’s such a hard thing to identify who people are or are not.
Such a kid would not, in fact, need to do any of those things if born in 1809 given the lack of existence of such requirements to get a job, lack of existence of driver’s licenses or the Social Security system let alone numbers.
While I know what you meant, it is a historical interest to compare how it was in Lincoln’s time to ours. He didn’t even have to take a bar exam or provide any documentation when he was actually admitted to the bar, Illinois just required attestation by the court that he was someone of “moral character.” He prepared himself for the practice of law by vigorous study and reading.
Oh, some people definitely refused. I used to have a friend whose mother called her all the time when she needed her brother’s SSN, because when my friend was born (around the same time I was, 1980) it wasn’t required and they’d be damned if they were giving their baby a gumbint tracking number! And then when her brother was born much later they couldn’t avoid it so they got hers at the same time, oh well, and it’s one number different.