Wow! That's a big tease (your comment), but I'm going to have to see something really compelling to believe that births weren't provided by or through a state agency to the local newspapers. Knock our socks off.
I asked this on the Honolulu Advertiser comments section of the article about “Persistent Requests for Obama’s Birth Certificate”. The person I was conversing with wouldn’t respond but I know we’ve got some good, sound minds here so I’ll ask it here.
If the Hawaii DOH office in 1961 made a master list of births each week and sent it to the newspapers what would you expect to see in the actual newspapers?
Would the editors have the option of printing some, all, or none of the announcements? Would they have discretion to print the names at different times?
Given the requirement that birth certificates from the local registrar were to be delivered to the state registrar weekly except for the outlying islands which sent theirs in by mail on the 4th of the month, what patterns would you expect to see in the newspapers? What variables would create flukes?
Part of the scientific process is to come up with a hypothesis and then to test it by seeing how well it predicts the outcomes. A hypothesis that doesn’t accurately predict what is actually observed fails the test and has to be tweaked or outright abandoned.
So let’s do that with the birth announcements. The hypothesis is that the state DOH made up a master list of births for the week and sent the list to the newspapers which then published those announcements.
If that was true, what would we expect to see?