I thought about that and had a look at the Nordyke certificates from which it appears best as I can tell that the small area to the left of the vertical line is still part of the same page and not the prior page.
Is it possible we are seeing a different birth certificate bound in a book and the numbers you see on the left really belong to another certificate on a different page.
Don’t know what these look like in their files.
I thought about that and had a look at the Nordyke certificates from which it appears best as I can tell that the small area to the left of the vertical line is still part of the same page and not the prior page.
If it was a different BC we’d see the Obama BC go down into the binding and the left-side BC also go down into the binding. We don’t see that. Whatever is written in that margin is from the same page. With the page already starting to go down for the binding, whatever question was asked in the margin (as evidenced by the question mark) had to be short.
“the numbers you see on the left really belong to another certificate on a different page.”
That has always been my interpretation (or at least that the image was made to look that way). The coding numbers seem to be placed just to the right of most items. If the whitehouse.gov “document” is indeed a digital forgery, the pasted in long hospital name would have likely “covered up” the code number for that box.
The thing is, it shouldn't be bound in a book. It should be in a type of loose leaf book with metal brads so documents can be taken in and out (yeah, like hello Sandypants). Back in the early days of birth record books, I'm talking the 1920s and 30s, they used prebound books but found out those didn't work so well. For one thing, the registrars are anal about dates so births for each year would never fit precisely within a pre-bound book. You'd have too few births to fill it during the calendar year or you'd have too many. So, they went with the loose leaf type so every calendar year or whatever their set dates were would all fit within a single book. The loose leaf would also allow for delayed births to be inserted within the birth year. Later, when people started using copy machines, the loose leaf style helped so that the clerk could removed the page to place it on the machine without damaging the entire book. Those books are heavy and with age will tear and they're just too cumbersome to copy with the page in it. Before copy machines, the clerk would retype the information onto a current blank bc form, so if forms changed then information may have not been included in the typed "copy" which is what this looks like since this one only has 23 boxes and the 1961 manual speaks to 46 which includes the birth weight, etc.
Also, that curved copy isn't exactly legal (and forget about it ever being a "true copy" of the original bc) because it doesn't show everything on the document. Case in point the handwritten numbers we can't read.