Sunday, January 22, 2017

Birth Certificates and other valuable papers

Remember the dilemma of Jorgan's lost birth certificate? He found it!
Safe and sound in his back pack.
I asked if I could borrow it and take it back to the court house to show the gal I had talked to earlier and to ask if she can update the info. This person had asked if I was married when Jorgan
was born and gave me the news that Ellis's name was not on the certificate.

When I took the paper to the desk and explained why I was there the gal that was working that
day said, "I am not the person you talked to last time, but I remember when you were here."
She looked at the paper and said, "I doubt if you got this paper here. It doesn't have a seal on it. And this isn't a birth certificate. It is a certificate of live birth."

I turned the paper over and showed her the date stamped on the back and the name of the
court house I was standing in at that moment and the seal embossed on the paper.
"Oh!" she said. "Hmm!"
She turned it over and looked at Ellis's name and place of birth all filled in at the right spots.
"This looks like it was typed in later. The typing is different than the rest of the document."

You can imagine the feeling of (yes, I will be brave and call it what it was)
anger that swept over me.
"I can assure you that I did not type this name in," was what I managed to say.

"Oh no, I'm not saying you did. And anyway, this is not something we can fix here.
You'll have to call the state and explain what happened and they will fix it for you.
If they say it is a mistake on their part you won't have to pay the $40.00 to get your
husband's name on the certificate." 

I imagined a whole morning sitting on the phone waiting for someone to talk to about
the situation. And how could I prove anything over the phone?

All my fears and worries were not needed.

I got a real person when I dialed the number. She listened to my explanation.
She took my phone number and said she would call back. In about an hour or so
I got a phone call from the same lady. She said she had looked up the information
and now my husband's name, Ellis Harshbarger, was on the birth certificate.

The interesting thing about this is she hadn't asked me my husband's name.
So it was there the whole time and someone had made a mistake somewhere along the way.
The other interesting thing is you can get a passport with that paper that says
"Certificate of Live Birth" at the top.

That's all the birth certificate some of us have . . . those of us that were born way back in the
olden days. Mine is printed on green paper and says I was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
So hang on to those old papers and maybe keep them in a fire proof safe.

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