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Well, patlin is saying that the Nordyke and Obama announcements ran three days apart. If that’s the case, maybe the newspapers printed them daily. But that’s hard to believe. Births simply are not breaking news.

An educated guess would be that a Friday deadline for submission would likely be for Sunday publication. But just because Kapiolani reported to the state registrar on Fridays doesn’t mean that the newspaper got the list the same day — unless the hospital made a carbon copy, which is indeed possible.

This was back in the days of mimeograph machines and carbon paper. That’s something to think about. Did Vital Stats compile a list especially for the newspaper, or did it require the list in triplicate from the hospital and then pass one copy on to the newspapers? We are SO spoiled to quick and easy copying. It was NOT easy then. No computers, no Xerox copiers.

If vital stats just got the birth certificates (no list) and had to take data from them to make a list, the labor involved might mean that they did not get the list ready for the newspaper on the same day they received the certificates.

The issue isn’t when the hospitals submitted to the registrar, but rather when the office of vital statistics submitted lists to the newspapers. How often did the newspapers print these announcements? It is indeed possible that various sources/hospitals reported to the state on different days and that the state, in turn, submitted the info to the newpapers not in one comprehensive batch per week but rather on different days sorted by source. If that’s the case, the newspapers may have printed announcements more than once a week with different locales on different days.

That would certainly explain what patlin claims. The Obama and Nordyke announcements on different days strongly suggests different places of birth. The Nordykes on the Kapiolani list, Obama on a general list that includes family-reported births?

Remember that this was in pre-computer days. I doubt that there would have been any effort made to merge lists from different sources. It would have to be done manually and would be labor intensive for no good reason. The births from each hospital would more likely be listed together. I forget how the Obama announcement column reads — is it alphabetical, sorted by date, etc? I need to go back and look.

I would seriously doubt that births from the outer islands would be merged with Honolulu births, but they could certainly have been at the beginning or end of the list. Or they could have had their own day.

As to newspapers’ discretion — they can print anything they want or omit anything they want to, as long as it’s not libelous. However, they really try to be as inclusive and fair as possible, and they would almost certainly try to include any reported birth in their circulation areas. They would just take the official report of vital records and print it as received, no editing. As I said before, this kind of stuff sells papers.

Pardon my meandering thoughts. Hope it makes sense.