BTW, if the best you’ve got are posts from bloggers writing from Virginia, you’re in deeper trouble than I imagined.
Abercrombie said in December, 2010 that he was
A) going to see what he could do legally to release documents (governor cannot legally release a birth certificate, he cannot even go and look at the birth certificates)
B) he was not going to ask Obama for permission to release his document.
Under those parameters no birth certificate was ever going to be released by Abercrombie. There was no need to search the DOH for a birth certificate.
According to the CNN reporter (Ed Henry) who interviewed Abercrombie, he wanted to release more documentation. More means additional or other.
That was Abercrombie’s goal - find documentation other than the birth certificate to prove a Hawaiian birth. The DOH houses vital records which cannot be unilaterally released by the governor so they went looking in the state archives and found something written down.