Obtaining Birth Certificates
Obtaining Birth Records
Obtaining birth certificates in the United States and abroad can be confusing, because there are so many different jurisdictions and so many different systems for recording birth information at use. The U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs does a good job of explaining the basics of finding birth certificate records in foreign countries (read on), so I’ll mainly discuss how to obtain birth certificates in the U.S.
Generally speaking, you probably know where to go to find your birth certificate or the birth documents for your children. I’ll discuss how to obtain birth records of dead relatives while searching family ancestry and performing genealogy studies. Those searching for their own birth certificates can use much of this info to help them to obtain birth records.
1. Obtain a Full Name
To accurately find a birth certificate, the full name of that person needs to be obtained. A partial name could easily lead to the wrong certificate of birth. When searching a woman’s birth certificate, you’ll need to obtain her maiden name. Search through marriage records to find that name, if you known her married name.
If you can’t find her marriage record, then search the census records for women with her first name who were born in the same year (or roughly the same year). Then find her siblings, collect those names and try to connect those names through deduction and perusing other records of the time. If this doesn’t work, talk to relatives, read obituaries or collect any family literature, from old Bibles, books, cards or letters. Eventually, you should be able to learn her maiden name.
2. Find the Place of Birth
Learning where a person was born becomes immensely important, also. This allows you to perform a targeted and accurate genealogical search in the public records of counties the person was born, as well as the vital records of the state they were born. Once you have a person’s place of origin and full birthname, you should be able to find their birth certificate pretty quickly.
If you can’t learn where this person was born, you might search through military records or old government social security records for the person’s old social security number, which should be available. A deceased person’s social security # helps immensely in searches of their public records.
3. Learn the Approximate Birthdate
If you are having trouble with one of the above, learn from family members your relative’s birthdate or approximate time of birth. Local libraries can be an invaluable search resource in these cases, because they will have an extensive birth index and death index. If the birth index doesn’t help, search the death index and then look up the person’s obituary.
4. Obtain the Birth Certificate
Once you have a full name, place of birth and date of birth, learn which government agency to contact and apply for the birth certificate. Most state and local governments have a vital statistics division which will house birth records. Make the inquiry and you should very soon have obtained the birth certificate you want.
5. Birth Certificate Resources
To read more about obtaining birth certificates in the United States, here are links to information on obtaining birth certificates in many different U.S. states on the U.S. State Department website. The Department of State also offers advice on how to obtain a certified copy of a consular report of birth abroad.
Related Posts
Public Birth Records
How To Find a Person’s Date of Birth
How To Find Your Birth Parents
How To Look Up Adoption Records
About the Public Records Act
How To Search Census Records Online
This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 at 4:15 pm and is filed under Birth Records, Genealogical Records, Vital Records. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
[...] « Obtaining Birth Certificates [...]
[...] Court Records Obtaining Birth Certificates Public Birth Records How To Find a Person’s Date of Birth How To Find Your Birth [...]