So, does this make you, “puzzledgal”? LOL
Sorry, I couldn’t resist. 
There have been times when hospitals prepared cute little unofficial birth certificates including foot prints but when my kids were born in 89/90 the hospital wasn’t doing that any more. But I’m not sure that “most people” think that is their birth certificate. I needed the official government one to get my driver’s license in the 80s , to register my kids for school and Little League and so on. Maybe in the 70s my mother would have thought the hospital one was good enough but there has been no point in my life where I would have though the memento meant anything.
When people talk about the “real one”, it tends to confuse people who have only seen the official, government issued one with the seal - especially when someone says you need to order the certificate from the county/state/city ( you didn’t) because which entity holds hte records depends on where you were born.
The only passport office that had an appointment for my buddy’s son was apparently NOLA, so he flew there Wednesday and had his passport yesterday. The things you’ll do for a 50% off heli ski trip, right?
So, was the cost of the flight to NOLA more than the 50% he saved on the ski trip? In any case, he got it done!
Hmmm, I wonder if arriving in a foreign capital with a passport issued, ‘this morning’, causes any eyebrows to raise at Customs or Immigration?
Oh, yeah. Miami to NOLA is cheap, I imagine. Heli skiing is…not.
Unless you travel internationally frequently, IMO it’s not worth the trouble and expense to get.
Well, that’s exactly what my SiL did! LOL
She had no problem with the Paris trip. One wonders, however, about other destinations like in the Middle East.
It’s not required - your passport is enough to get you back into the US - but when you’ve just come off of a 13-hour flight and it feels like 4AM to you, getting in the short (Global Entry) immigration line instead of the long one is really nice.
It also includes TSA Pre, which is a nice perk at the start of your trip.
Yeah - overkill for me personally (I rarely fly) but my husband got his set up 6 or so years back when he DID do a fair bit of travelling, and I signed up just so it would be easier on both of us if we travelled.
GE is not that much more than TSA pre-check (and includes TSA pre) so I went with that, as did he, though neither of us has flown internationally. A friend who does, every year or so, has it, and said it really smoothed her way through customs etc. on a recent trip - she was on the train to her home within 45 minutes of landing, I think she said.
What do you mean by “you didn’t”? I had to order mine from “the county/state/city”, which was indeed the state where I was born (not where I was living when I placed the order). Or am I misunderstanding something?
I vaguely recall once reading something about proof of identity where a baptismal certificate could serve as documentation. This would have been 30-40 years back. I actually HAD my baptismal certificate at the time (it might still be somewhere in the basement). I never had occasion to test this, however.
Interestingly, my birth certificate doesn’t prove that I was born in the US, it proves that someone by the name of “Mama Maidenname” was born in the US. I think that in theory, anyone could order my birth certificate (last time I did so, 20ish years ago, I was not asked to prove I was who I was), and if they had good fakes of other ID documents, go right on out and start getting other documents in my name.
I looked into getting my driver’s license upgraded to RealID compliant (not really needed as I have a passport card, and quite possibly my Global Entry card would do the job), and one of the types of documents is to prove I’m a resident in my state. Only, one of the things they ask for is a utility bill (or possibly postmarked mail sent to your home address). About the only stuff we get mailed here anymore is junk mail, which has no visible postmark, and the utility bills / mortgage documents are all online - we could fake one easily enough. Not sure what the workaround is for that (I suppose if someone argued, I could pull up the county tax records on my phone and show them that I’m listed as the owner of the house).
Nexus (expedited crossing between Canada and the US) includes TSA Pre and Global Entry, and is only $50 for 5 years compared to $78 for TSA Pre and $100 for GE.
Of course it’s a PITA to get to the interview as they’re only done along the border (we had to drive 6 hours to Saulte Ste. Marie for ours) but it sure has proved worth it.
This is true of marriage licenses too. When my fiancee and I applied for a marriage license, we got a fancy piece of colored paper decorated with scrollwork, which was titled, I think, “Certificate of Marriage”, and had empty places to fill in our names, date of marriage, etc. The clerk made it very clear that this was not an actual marriage license, which we would have to order from the county records department.
That’s interesting to know.
We had to use ours (the one we got on the day) to go to a Social Security office to register my name change. It didn’t occur to me that we’d ever need anything different. My husband thinks he knows where it is (40+ years later, and several moves), which in theory we might need; my SIL had to find the parents’ when she was getting things straightened out there last year after FIL died, to ensure MIL got FIL’s higher benefit.
Sorry - What I meant was that the person I was replying to didn’t say what I usually see which is for example " You have to get one from the county where you were born " And then someone comes back and says " No I have to order it from the city where I was born" and Person 1 insists it must be ordered from the county because they can’t imagine that anyplace does it differently than they are used to. Which doesn’t matter so much when it’s someone on a message board but does when the DMV clerk in some other state won’t accept a birth certificate issued by the City of New York because it wasn’t issued by a county.
I’m starting to wonder if it’s only my city that automatically mails the official certificate. I may have gotten some unofficial certificate from the church but I definitely got an official one a couple of weeks later without needing to order it.
If you ever once again run across someone who won’t accept a birth certificate because it wasn’t issued by a county, you might point out to them that not every state even has government at the county level. Connecticut, for instance, does not.
I have never seen a birth certificate that wasn’t an official birth certificate, and am surprised that they are a thing.
As for proving that you are the person named on the birth certificate, there are a variety of ways to do that, including personal recognizance. Many years ago, my boss needed a passport, and didn’t have any government issued photo ID. (He didn’t drive.) I went to the passport office with him, and i affirmed that he was the person named on his birth certificate. (I had a passport and other id, although i also filled out the paperwork to get my passport renewed on the same trip.)
On the way back, he asked me how i was sure he was who he claimed he was. I said that i supposed i didn’t know for certain, but he’d told a very consistent story for 7 years and had always been honest to the best of my knowledge, and i was comfortable vouching for him.
I grew up in New England, where counties are vestigial, and sometimes have no functions at all. So I’m always a little surprised by folks who think of counties as a default level of government for important stuff.
There are low-level bureaucrats that wouldn’t believe you if you told them New Mexico is legitimately a state of the 50 United States.
I wouldn’t hold too much hope out if you have the misfortune of being “served” by one of these small-minded functionaries.