I recently decided to start working on my family tree. Since this isn’t something I can devote a lot of time to, I am doing it in “baby steps”. This week, that step is to see if I can find a copy of my birth certificate. I’ve heard it is good to start your research with yourself, and work from there.
Sometimes, there is a strange synchronicity between what I am working on, and what life brings me. Last week, I decided to begin working on my family tree. There is a piece of advice that has been passed around on many genealogy blogs. Start with yourself, and work from there. To me, this is a good enough reason to select myself as a place to start. After all, you have to start somewhere.
Of course, I know what my birthdate is. I also know where I was born, (both the state, and the county). I could probably just jot that information down on my family tree chart and move on. However, it seems to me that the proper way to do genealogy work is to actually locate a vital record, (or a copy of one), that verifies the information that you believe to be true.
This means that I would need to track down my birth certificate. As I was debating whether or not this was worth doing, life threw me a synchronous event. My husband and I are planning a trip outside of the country, which means that we will need passports. In order to get a passport, I have to have a copy of my birth certificate. He thinks he knows where his is located. I, however, have never once seen a copy of my own birth certificate.
We started this process by looking up the website for the Clerk’s Office of the county that I was born in. There are directions to follow, and we may very well be working our way through them in the next couple of weeks. When all is said and done, I should have a copy of my birth certificate.
I decided to go ahead and try FamilySearch to see if that would help me to locate a copy of my birth certificate. Unfortunately, no matches turned up, no matter what I did. If I had to guess, I think the problem is that I am still alive, so the records that include a death index do not apply. The other problem is that I was born long after the most recent date of all the records that my search is bringing up.
This got me absolutely nowhere. Maybe next time, I will try the reverse strategy. I will search for any vital record I can find about the oldest ancestor that I am aware of. Today, I learned that it is impossible to find my birth certificate online without spending money to see a digital copy of it.
Image by Katelyn Kenderdine on Flickr