A Citation Puzzle for a PA Birth Register

Howard Matthews, photo enhanced with MyHeritage.

Another month has passed without posting. Again, I have not been doing too much active research but I have been able to do something genealogy related every week, I think. Things get a little fuzzy the last two weeks because I've been dealing with the longest bout of sciatica I have ever experienced. Thank goodness that has finally progressed to just enough of a twinge so I don't forget my stretches in the morning.

One thing I have been working on is a citation for a birth register containing an entry for my paternal grandfather, Howard Matthews, who was born in Pennsylvania in 1901, just a few years before they started issuing birth certificates. In 1938 he had a heck of a time proving his birth so that he and my grandmother could get a passport for a work trip to the Near East. Too bad he didn't know about this register.

The PA archives website says these records were kept by the Clerk of the Orphans Court, the microfilmed records on FamilySearch seem to indicate something else and and state statutes indicate that by 1901 it should have been the Board of Health who was collecting these records, even before they began to issue certificates. In the end, what matters most is who provided that information, and that is still a mystery. Under any statute for these records, the information could have been provided by a physician or midwife if one attended the birth, or by a parent, if there were no attendant.  Now that I'm feeling better, I'm going to reread those state statutes and contact the archives to see if I can get some clarification on their part at least. I'll probably never know who provided the information since it was not recorded in the register.

Speaking of those statutes, I'm sure most genealogists are already following Judy Russell, The Legal Genealogist. But, in case you missed it, she has shared the wonderful work of Debbie Mieszala who is compiling a state-by-state online law library you can access here at the Advancing Genealogist. This is where I found links to the laws that governed the collection of information for these birth registers in Pennsylvania. As Judy says, you have to understand the law to understand the records.

My next post will be for the Honor Roll project, and then I'll be getting ready to research Donald's family in the 1950 census but I will certainly post my citation once I've done some more digging.