History of the Birth Certificate
Introduction
There are many ways to prove that you are an American citizen. You could be born to parents of American nationality, or on American soil, or take a test to become a naturalized citizen. But it wasn’t always that easy during the colonial period of the United States. It didn’t matter what your origin was because a formal government did not exist. Of course, the colonies were under British rule so colonists were considered subjects of the king. To become an American today there is a secure process to protect birth certificates that record and establish our birthrights that go along with being an American citizen. Preserving America will uncover the improbable history of the modern birth certificate and what it means to your rights, privileges, and obligations of citizenship.
Birth Records
The birth certificate was born from a tradition that reached the American colonies along with the German immigrants when they arrived in the 17th century. They indirectly influenced the creation of the birth certificate with an art form that was used to record their family ancestry. Any type of birth record that occurred prior to the revolution occurred in New England,
in towns that kept records of whenever somebody was born or somebody died. If somebody was married – there were registers there too. Those are the only types of birth, death, and marriage records that exist in colonial times for most of the colonies. American colonial provinces developed their naturalization policies outside of English law. These policies were generally accepted, as the royal colonial charters did not explicitly grant naturalization to all colonial subjects. In many instances, citizenship was an expression of the public will provided through the colony’s legislative processes.
In Massachusetts, all colonists came from England where they had been collecting vital records mandated by the King in 1538. Henry VIII declared that churches would record birth, marriage, and death records. The people from England who settled in New England had that recorded tradition already. It was done primarily early in the 1630s by the church, but the towns in New England were mandated to record vital records. Consequently, New England is a wealth of information because we have the town records and the church records. Even under the threat of the British Parliament, the colonies persisted in drafting local laws to fulfill their growing demand for new immigrants until those powers were completely prohibited by the crown in 1773.
During the Revolutionary War, some of that activity stopped because you were dealing with differences in government because it is changing during the revolution. The federal government and the entire federal experience in various states would end up deciding whether or not to do any type of birth recording. Most of them decided not to do so. One state did and that was Vermont. Vermont has recorded births prior to the colonial period leading up to the American Revolution.
Debates over property and political rights exposed a growing belief among the colonists that foreign residents who worked hard toward the common good deserved an equal share, as well as citizen rights. The colonists were generally in favor of immigrants as their contributions to the welfare of the colonies were highly valued. It was this environment in the colonies that allowed Americans to examine the concept of allegiance. This also played into the emerging belief in the equality of rights regardless of one’s origin. The Declaration of Independence mentioned this in its charges against King George III. It stated that the king has endeavored to prevent the population of these states for the purpose of obstructing the laws for the naturalization of foreigners.
After the American Revolution was over the Articles of Confederation stated that each colony could independently pass its own naturalization laws. As a result, the new American states produced capricious naturalization laws and requirements. However, certain assumptions were made including affirming allegiance to an authority and a mandatory period of physical residence prior to obtaining the right of citizenship. The Constitution, which did not address naturalization, but acknowledged the lack of legal uniformity under the Articles of Confederation.
Unfortunately naturalization policies and procedures were not developed at the Federal level until 1952. Previously, colonies and states levied their own form of documenting the naturalization and birthrights of its citizens. There was more trust in the 17th and 18th centuries. If somebody came in to record a deed, usually both parties came into the Recorder’s office. The government would accept that these parties were stating, “I received money from the first person and likewise.” Within the church, the minister would know his parishioners and would know that that baby being brought in to be christened belonged to that couple. There was no question who’s baby it was, as there might be today to prove that what you are doing is legal.
In Medieval European cities and villages, births were recorded by the church, which maintained a simple register. A practice that was imported to the colonies by the Quakers and Pilgrims and continued until the 20th century. However, the real purpose of the register was to track property transactions. The correlation is not only between the birth certificate and immigration, but there is also the correlation between immigration and the lineage societies all being founded about the same time to prove that you were an American. The birth certificate proved that you were born in America and that you are an American citizen. That you were not a foreigner who just immigrated into this country. That is part of the reason for the rise of birth certificates. Of the fifty (50) states, thirty-one (31) states passed some sort of vital records law between 1900 and 1923. From a genealogist’s standpoint, this is where they run into difficulties because each state has its own recording policy. No Federal policy existed regarding the issuance of birth certificates. It was strictly a state function and the states all have different varying laws relating to the information which might be available because the recording of birth and deaths is strictly a state function and not a Federal function. Churches would keep records as a means of tracking births, marriages, and deaths.
In 1682, the Pennsylvania colony established a law requiring records to be kept of all births and deaths of its colonial inhabitants. Although these vital statistics were recorded in registers by local churches or town clerks they lacked any sort of consistency and enforcement. It was a religious function primarily. In 1682, Pennsylvania created a law to maintain vital records. However, it was not enforced. Conjecture might suggest that because these were all religious men who were running the Pennsylvania government at that time and knew that the churches, Quaker’s Friends primarily, were maintaining birth, marriage, and death records, they might have decided they did not have to enforce that law.
Beginning in 1680, the New Jersey records during the American colonial period, there simply was not a government administration or nearby church to properly record births and deaths. It was left up to the local communities and families to document these important events. The family bible was very important. Most families had them, but not everybody could afford them. Not everybody could read so not everybody had a Bible. Those who had them would enter the information into them. Those are treasured by researchers today as an original record. When the American Revolutionary War began much of the recording of births stopped. Recordkeeping was so bad that only half of the births and deaths were properly recorded in Massachusetts before 1842. However, there were exceptions. In the 1840s, states began to think about recording birth and deaths. The one exception is the City of Philadelphia. The City decided as early as 1803 to start keeping death records. Partly because the city had been hit several times during the colonial period by yellow fever epidemics. So there was a question of keeping an eye on mortality rates to record what was causing these deaths.
Life was hard in 18th century America. It was not unheard of a woman having an average of five children during their lifetime. If she died, the father would likely remarry. This created a need to document the ancestral tree. As the household expanded, in many cases, the pastor was not easily accessible because he lived in another state or jurisdiction. The couples had to wait until the pastor came to the area to conduct the marriage service. When they started settling the frontier in Pennsylvania itinerant ministers would travel around the countryside and people would get married when somebody was going to be in the area. As colonists pushed westward and were living remotely they would get married by whatever religious minister happened to come into the area.
In Germany, state officials tried to control population growth by setting a legal restriction on marriage to make it more difficult to achieve. As a result, the peasant society created customs separate from the traditions of the church which would later have a direct impact upon early colonial history. As Germans immigrated to the American colonies a large population settled in southeastern Pennsylvania. They were primarily from Lutheran and reformed German families. German speaking people immigrated from Europe for a variety of reasons. The Lutherans and the German Reformed who made up the vast majority of the immigrants, came primarily for economic opportunities. There was a whole range of other groups including the Mennonites, Schweinfelders, Moravians, and other smaller religious sects that came because of religious persecution in Europe. They were welcome in Pennsylvania due to William Penn’s policies of religious tolerance. As a result, they could practice their religion and also find economic opportunity.
With their occupation of land in Pennsylvania the immigrants brought a range of traditions with them including many different German dialects. There wasn’t a unified German language at the time. They also brought distinctive architectural practices with them, especially decorative arts. Everything from particular types of furniture, techniques of decoration, to pottery, and of course the fractur, or the decorated manuscript arts. They also imported an art form to document births, baptisms, deaths, and marriages. It was an art form deeply rooted in German medieval manuscript art or lettering known as fractur. It was a German typeface that was primarily used from the 15th century until World War II. Fractur derived from a Latin word referring to the fractured or broken style of the lettering. Fractur was in its earlier form was basically a typeface used in German-speaking areas of Europe. Then there was a manuscript style of lettering derived from that typeface. In Europe, if you were to look or ask to see a fractur, you could be shown anything printed in that typeface. But, in America the term fractur has been applied beginning in the 20th century, especially to this distinctive genre of decorative works of art on paper, including all types of certificates and other documents.
American fractur was a reflection of the European tradition of illuminated manuscripts. Artists would take a mechanically printed piece and then elaborate it with hand-drawn swirls or scrolls. As decorative art, this process maintained the illuminated manuscript tradition from the Middle Ages. Fractur was used for a variety of purposes. The most common type was the birth or baptismal certificate. This was especially popular with the Lutherans and the German Reformed. In that church, baptism was a particularly significant religious rite of passage, and so they would produce these documents to commemorate that. Fractur drawings were executed by mostly male teachers and their students by hand utilizing ink and watercolor.
Fractur were found in a wide variety of forms, such as writing samples, birth and baptismal certificates, marriages, house blessings, book plates, and figurative scenes. Other groups of the Pennsylvania Germans, such as the Mennonites and the Schwenkfelders did not practice infant baptism and so they developed different types of fractur. Things related to the educational system such as writing samples and alphabets were also fractur and was used for book plates to identify ownership of books. It was also used often as a gift that people might commission. A New Year’s greeting, for example, to give to a neighbor or a friend. There were love letters that were exchanged. There was a large variety of fractur but it was birth and baptismal certificates being the primary example.
Most of the fractur artists were men. They tended to be schoolmasters or ministers because they had the necessary education to make these documents. They were literate, but they also had access to the clients. If you were a minister, you were often baptizing children. You could make these certificates as a side business. If you were a schoolmaster making writing samples for your pupils that made a great deal of sense. What begins to happen is that as one schoolmaster teaches his students to write like him, to copy his writing with these certificates. Some of these students in the next generation were very good at copying their teacher’s work. Before you know it, you get regional schools developing from one particular artist’s influence.
Most American Fraktur were created between 1740 and 1860. The first Fraktur created in North America was drawn by artists in 1750 at the Ephrata Cloister, about thirty (30) miles west of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in Lancaster County. Early Fraktur produced at the cloister was created with inks, paints and paper. By the 1760s, some handwritten manuscripts, birth and baptismal certificates started to appear. By the 1780s, printing of these certificates began. That starts at the Ephrata Cloister where they had a printing press. The artists were trying to keep up with demand and so printing certificates were very practical and efficient. They could add hand applied color to them. Watercolor decoration and fill in the blanks with the genealogical data. We also see them starting to use wood block stamps that they would add embellishment to the certificates with them. There were various ways of mechanizing or speeding up the process to keep up with demand.
Birth and baptismal certificates were also made by well-known clerks or scriveners who traveled from town to town demonstrating their penmanship and creative flair on ready-made certificates or templates by several well-known fractur artists. There are dozens of artists who have distinctive bodies of work, but we don’t know their names. Perhaps one of the real founding fathers of fractur was a German immigrant named Heinrich Otto, who came from Germany and settled in Berks County, Pennsylvania. He was first a weaver, but then became a schoolmaster and he was one of the first to use printed certificates from Ephrata. He was also making absolutely gorgeous elaborate manuscript certificates for young people. He trained a number of his sons to follow him in the production of fractur. Four of his sons are known to be Fraktur artists.
The treasures of fraktur are the intricate hand-drawn birth certificates and book plates made by skilled artists. There are very particular types of fraktur, such as a very rare one known as a meta- morphosis. This is a four-part booklet made by the school master Durs Rudy, who worked in Lehigh County. He immigrated from Germany in 1803 and also settled in Lehigh County. Basically the booklet he crafted was intended for religious instruction of children so that they could manipulate the flaps and change the scenes to follow the story. The original is very pristine and we want to keep it in that condition. This is a mock-up so that you can see how the paper was attached, how the flaps can lift the top or lower the bottom to change the scene. There is a sample in full color of the last booklet in the series. As the story progresses it goes from Adam to Eve, then the crucifixion, to resurrection of Christ. It then morphs into a young man who turns into a skeleton reminding us to always be prepared for death. The final scene we see this young man reading from the Bible to a young woman. When we lift the top flap, the tree turns into angels flying by. As we lower the flap, we see that the young man is here in Jerusalem where he received the crown of life from the angels. At the bottom, it is signed by Durs Rudy and dated 1832.
Fraktur was created by all of the Pennsylvania German groups including the Amish, Mennonite, Reformed Lutherans and the Schwankfelders. Another particularly influential artist was a man named Johann Adam Eyer, who was a Lutheran. He taught school in the Mennonite school system primarily in Bucks and Montgomery counties in Pennsylvania. Eyer was a highly influential school master who taught generations of students to follow in his footsteps. One has to be very careful in distinguishing their work. You have to really look at the subtleties of the handwriting to try to figure out whether it’s Eyer or one of his students that you’re looking at.
As hand-drawn art, fractur began to dissipate as the printed form began to evolve. Writing samples were relegated to Bibles, chests and blank certificates that were printed by the thousands to supply the Pennsylvania German public consumption. When trying to make attributions of works to particular artists what is most important is to assign a piece of work to an artist that you are focusing on. There are one or two pieces that are clearly signed by Johand Adam Eyer or others. To use that as sort of a benchmark for comparing. It is like being a forensic handwriting analyst trying to look at every detail. If you know how they form their lowercase g’s or how do they end their sentences with a particular flourish; or you know more plainly and and just really studying it very very closely.
Fraktur was not only a creative and instrumental method to record births and marriages, but as the Revolutionary War ended many Pennsylvanian widows used fractur documents to prove they were married to a deceased American Continental soldier to receive his pension. The Fraktur birth and baptismal certificates began in America as a way of not only commemorating the importance of baptism, but also as a way of recording personal data. In Europe, where church and state were one, there was a very official system of recording birth dates, recording baptismal dates, and marriages. Information in colonial Pennsylvania was not that same system particularly in the 18th century before settlement really progressed. These birth and baptismal certificates that we see being made are actually quite different from those in Germany because they include a lot of genealogical data. They have the parents’ names. Often the mother’s maiden name. The date of birth, of course the child’s name, in addition to that baptismal information. It is a way of capturing all of this information absent an official state or very organized church system doing it. There is certainly the potential that the kind of modern birth certificate that we all know today, in many ways, may have evolved out of this practice or this penchant for recording personal information and commemorating it in some kind of certificate or document form.
One example of how the Fraktur birth and baptismal certificates were used to establish official identity is that following the American Revolution there were widows, family members, or heirs who submitted birth and baptismal certificates made in the fractur tradition to the war board or the government entity as proof of age or death to collect Revolutionary War pensions. Other records were also used to prove citizenship if a widow or soldier did not have proof of their identity.
Revolutionary War pension records proved who you were, the birth date, or whatever was available to rely upon other types of records. They would have ecclesiastical records, the church records, also family Bibles. Family Bibles are an important resource for recording birth, deaths, and marriages within a family. Many times both the Revolutionary War pension applications and the War of 1812 pension applications were used for Civil War pension applications, even though they were not government-issued document.
Out of this tradition various laws were eventually created in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to modernize and centralize the recording of births, deaths, and marriages. Pennsylvania had its own set of problems. The United States did not have a national registration system for births and deaths because the Constitution left the responsibility up to the individual states. A 1906 law for Pennsylvania had some rationale behind it of why they started keeping the birth and death records at a statewide level. The state was very upset at the response that the counties were making, so an 1892 law added some state supervision over the process. In 1915 they ended up passing a law word for word exactly the same as the 1906 law with the exception of six words. The six words essentially eliminated any type of county recording in Pennsylvania as it became solely a state function. Prior to the United States becoming a sovereign nation registration of births, deaths, and marriages was a function left to religious entities. In 1682, Pennsylvania created one of the first laws requiring the colony to document and maintain vital records but they did not enforce it very well.
This really had to do with land. People needed to know who was related to whom. Who was descended from whom, for property and land reasons, so that somebody couldn’t just walk in say, “I am the son of Samuel Winslow.” Let’s say I am entitled to inherit his property. Every town official could not know everybody that lived in a town, so you maintained records largely to document family relationships.
The importance of the birth certificate cannot be understated. It is the most important document in a citizen’s life and ancestry a birth certificate is very important because that is a record which is made at the time of the birth. Therefore, the information should be as accurate as possible regarding the name of the person which could be changed anytime after the date of the birth. Also the parents names because a lot of this is trying to connect children with their parents there is also a correlation between the formal creation of the birth certificate in the 20th century with the rise of immigrants coming into the country.
The passage of vital record laws and lineage societies were developed as immigrants wanted to prove they too were Americans as a way to be quickly assimilated and accepted into society. When you talk about linear societies in America, a lot of them started in the 1880s 1890s. So there may have been a play to influence by the linear societies for this, as well. Of course today you know 100 plus years later any genealogist who is working on linear societies love the birth certificate because they give that connection between parents and child. Death certificates were not as accurate because the information was provided by someone who may not have known all the details of the deceased. Death certificates are based upon the information some informant providing that information to the funeral director who types up the death certificate and that information may not be completely accurate.
Prior to the creation of the formal birth certificate any American applying to the Social Security Administration for a pension was forced to use the American census as an alternate birth certificate to prove who they were other records, such as church records or family bibles were also used to prove one’s identity. In order to get a pension, that’s where the census comes into play, and this is something during the 1930s, with the advent of social security, and you have all these people who were 65 years old and older who were going on social security and they had no documentation for when they were born so the census bureau during the 1930s actually started to index the various censuses in 1930, 1920, and1910. The 1900, 1880, and the 1880 census, they only index for families with children 10 years old and younger and was not an every family index. It was primarily so people could use the census as an alternate birth certificate. There is one exception where the Federal government would create and maintain a birth record for an American citizen. The national archives has records of the federal government and they do not have any birth records. Except possibly that the only birth records of any type that are created by the Federal government are by the Department of State for an American citizen born overseas or born outside the country. Then they will create a birth certificate for that individual.
There have been some cases of fraud. There was a naturalization case in 1840 where three people were naturalized with the same declaration of intention. It was discovered that three people were naturalized with the same declaration of intention. Two of the decorations were fraudulent and one was legit. So, there’s a lot of fraud you know that was being played and a lot of records, not just birth certificates, but other types of records throughout the 19th century. That is where you run into more states saying they wanted to have more accurate documentation to prove personal identity between the 1840s and 1860s. Fraud also occurred in various elections where voters tried to pad voting lists in terms of fraud for birth certificates. There were a few cases for fraudulent naturalizations in the 1850s and 1860s in which people were caught with those fraudulent naturalizations and they had to be voided. There were court cases too. The entire election of 1840 was not typical. William Henry Harrison was politically frought to the point that there were over a hundred fraudulent declarations that were created in the Philadelphia. Concessions in court that were created and backdated and then pasted into a net into a decoration volume over there and somebody spotted it all and they had to avoid all 100 or whatever number there were of these fraudulent decorations.
The reason for it was that they were trying to pad the voting list Naturalizations in the 19th century were a very extraordinary political process at the time. Naturalizations usually take place in September or October of an election year just before November voting. Remember Naturalization’s during the 19th century is a very political process and it is most of your naturalizations in the19th century that take place in September and October. Then also there is peak points at the major Naturalization years or Presidential election years.
In 1952 when the United States Naturalization law was born as a uniform rule of Naturalization created as part of the Immigration and Nationality Act. It states that Congress shall have the power to establish a uniform rule of Naturalization. The act set forth the legal requirements for the acquisition of and divestiture from American nationality. The requirements have become more explicit since the ratification of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. The 14th Amendment was adopted on July 9, 1868, after the Civil War, as one of the reconstruction amendments.
The amendment addresses citizenship rights and equal protection of the laws and was proposed in response to issues related to former slaves section 1 of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution, states all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside, a person becomes a citizen of the United States at the time of birth by virtue of the first clause of the 14th Amendment, stating a person must be born in the United States, has parents that are subjects of a foreign power, but not in any diplomatic or official capacity of that foreign power, or has parents that have permanent domicile in residence in the United States.
In the modern world, most countries have laws that regulate the registration of births. There is one commonality among all countries it is the responsibility of the mother’s physician, midwife, hospital administrator, or the parents of the child, to see that the birth is properly registered and recorded with the proper government agency. The registration of that birth provides each child rights as a citizen of his or her country and all of the government benefits. The articles of the United Nations convention on the Rights of a Child, states every child has a right to a name, a nationality, and it is the responsibility of national governments to ensure this right, asserting that the child shall be registered immediately at birth and shall have the right from birth, to a name and to acquire a nationality. Becoming a citizen is a status recognized under law as being a legal member of a sovereign state or belonging to a nation. A birth certificate may be a small document but its tradition and history establishes who you are and provides access to the rights, privileges, and obligations of citizenship.
