Not Obama related, but all the hoopla over the two different documents (one in the vault, one released to the public) reminds me of a minor question I’ve had for a year and a half.
When the Dudeling was born, we were given a form to fill out for his birth certificate. One of the questions asked for the parents’ occupations. I put down “Superhero” and “Rockstar.” We laughed our laugh, and wondered if the rather severe lady that dropped off the form would come back and chastise us. Never happened.
A few weeks later we received the “Certificate of Live Birth.” Similar to the Hawaii, it did not have all the information that we put on the original form.
Does anyone know what happens to the original form? Is the hand-written form sitting in a New York records office somewhere, innocuously sitting there? Does New York use data entry clerks to transfer hand-written forms to a computerized or printed form? Do they have the discretion to override our entry and put none or leave the question blank? Or somewhere out there, is there an official record of our professions?
I saw the New York birth certificate of a relative of mine born in the 1950’s. It lists his father’s occupation, and I have no reason to doubt that it was true at the time.
You may have committed an offense of falsifying information on a form, but “superhero” seems to lead one to believe that it can’t possibly be true, and I don’t know how material that information really is.
Wouldn’t the burden be on the state to prove that I’m not a superhero? How would they do that? My day job is just a front.
Similarly, we both play instruments. On more than one occasion people have given us money. Even if we’re rockstars in our own mind, wouldn’t the state have to establish a definition of rockstar first, then try and prove we submitted knowingly false information? How would they do that?
ETA: heck, even if we forget about the money issue, we make people dance. We’re asked to play in certain situations. One doesn’t have to be paid to be a rockstar.
In modern times most jurisdictions use the filling out and filing of a “long form” document, let’s call it “record-of-birth”, not just for reporting the births but also for gathering demographic statistics. Then, some of the info in the record-of-birth, essentially only that related to place and date and identity of the parents, is in turn used to generate that we’ll commonly call the “birth certificate”, which is a certification that a record-of-birth is on file.
In the not too distant past, it used to be that the birth certificate would indeed be either a transcript or even an actual photostat (made from the microfiche) of at least the front page of the record-of-birth, printed onto the bordered security paper that would then be signed and stamped or sealed by the issuer. My BC issued c. 1980 used the latter of those formats, it showed my parents’ occupations, employers, street address of the hospital I was born in, showed the date, time and registry office where it was filed, and a whole bunch of other such material. I had to request it and have it issued at the same office where I had been registered (because they’d have the microfiche). OTOH my BC issued in 2009 simply has directly printed onto itself only the information that I was indeen born on such date, place, and time and to those parents, and no more, and I could request it online or go to any registry office in the commonwealth to get it issued.