Saturday, July 30, 2011

Sorting Saturday - Ignored Clues on scanned Birth Certificates

This is a follow-up to my previous post Sorting Saturday - BDM Certificates from Various Heaps .The BDM's I had to take to Kinko's, AKA Fed-Ex Office, are from Western Australia and just won't fit on my Canon CanoScan N1220U. When I first started in genealogy I didn't realise exactly how much there was on these certificates.
These West Australian Birth Certificates (from 1898-1906) have:
  1. Number in Register
  2. Child: When and where Born
  3. Child: Name and whether present at registration or not
  4. Sex
  5. Father: Name and Surname, Rank or Profession, Age, and Birth-place
  6. Father: When and Where married, Previous Issue living and deceased
  7. Mother: Name and Maiden Surname, Age, and Birth-place
  8. Informant: Signature, Description, and Residence of Informant
  9. Witness: Name of Accoucheur, Nurse by whom certified, and Names of Occupiers or other Witnesses
  10. Registrar: When registered and where
  11. Registrar: Signature of District Registrar
  12. Name, if added after the Regisration of Birth.
  13. Certification that this is a true copy of the register kept in Western Australia
I had previously entered the obvious items into my Family Tree Maker files and now, after verifying I hadn't made an error, I took a look at the Informant And Witness columns.
The informant for my Uncle Harold in 1898 was his father (nothing new there). But his father Harry was listed as an occupier of the house where Harold was born. i.e. he was born at home. This also held true for my Aunt Evelyn's birth in 1901 and my Aunt Ida's birth in 1904.
I found I hadn't missed very much the first time around.
The indices (or indexes) for Births, Deaths and Marriages in the state of Western Australia can be found at WA Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages