[BITList] Trump, Obama and the Birth Certificate Debate - NYTimes.com

[HUGH]

Can birth/marriage/death certifcates be faked?  Any piece of paper can be faked. Is Obama's birth certificate a fake? If the moon's made of green cheese, yes. I assume what Obama displayed was photocopy of the original, properly stamped, so where's the controversy?

My birth certificate bears my father's signature, but I've never seen it.  The one I have is the one issued to my parents when they registered my birth - it's a handwritten copy of the copy held in the Register Office where my birth was registered.  The original my father signed, and from which these copies were made, is held in the National Register House in Edinburgh - the closest I've ever got to that original is the digital image of it accessible in the Genealogy Centre in Glasgow.  And so it is with marriage and death certificates. I've never seen an error in a birth certificate, but marriage and death certificates can have errors in them, usually stemming from ignorance of facts on the part of those giving information to the Registrar.  These can be challenged and amended, but only on production of proof of the correct information. Anyone challenging a whole certificate would be thrown out.

A few weeks back, I had occasion to challenge the information on my father's 1983 death certificate.  In the course of an investigation that has nothing to do with the present subject, I had noted a discrepancy of 13 hours between what it said on my copy of the certificate (1920hrs) and the time of death on the image of the original (0620hrs). I got a meeting with the local Registrar.  After the ritual defensive remarks were over, she dashed away to fetch the volume containing her photocopies of the originals.  These are arranged two per folio page, and Dad's was alongside one with the 1920 hrs time on it - she showed me the evidence. The typist, it was suggested, had taken the time from the wrong certificate (and it hadn't been checked). The offending copy was taken from me and immediately shredded, in exchange for a certified and very high quality photocopy of the original.  So mistakes can happen even at source.

Trump claims to be of Scottish descent on his mother's side - I think I'll check up on that.  His hair must come from his paternal side.

Hugh.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.bcn.mythic-beasts.com/pipermail/bitlist/attachments/20110430/bb05a702/attachment.shtml