When titling cars, each title clerk is given a set of tag numbers to work from. And yes, the vehicle didnt get a tag # until all of the paperwork was completed. However, there are multiple clerks titling cars. One clear might get 10000 - 10025 and another clerk might get 10026 - 10050.
You dont seem to understand how absolutely manual processing government records of any kind was in 1961.
Unless you fully understand the exact process that the registrar’s office clerks used to process birth certificates in 1961, you simply can’t say with certainty that the date and certificate number combination are impossible.
It is likely that multiple clerks processed those records and it has been proved that the babies were not born on the same day and the certificates not filed on the same day. It is even more likely that different clerks processed the certificates. And if each clerk was assigned a particular numerical set of cert numbers to use in processing the records, it is even more likely that the cert numbers would be significantly out of whack.
The cert numbers are 637 and 641. You gave the example of clerk 1 getting 1-25 and clerk 2 getting 26-50. Going by 25’s might make sense.
But what kind of division of numbers would make the break between 637 and 641? And that division would have to last for 3 days...
Yes, I understand that things come in stacks and multiple clerks grabbing a handful of numbers as they need them, but this is different. As was said before you can’t have a number that falls before the date it was filed.
Back in my day, before the digital age there was one stamp. One stamp. Only just the one stamp. The reason for that is so there wouldn’t be mess ups where numbers were skipped or duplicated. Babies are a bit more important than cars. Documents came in and they were time and date stamped. With the one stamp. Sure, back at the place of origin they could have been stacked and accumulated until Friday or it was in the mail for a few days. That’s fine for the received (or accepted) stamp, but that’s not the problem with the COLB. We need to look at the information at the time it was FILED.
Then when it was filed (or recorded), it was given a number again from one stamp and only one stamp. One clerk manually stamped it. One clerk would file it on it’s particular page and index it - in numerical order.
Ok, say only two births came in that week. One was filed on Wednesday and numbered 37. Regardless of the when the second one came in (the day it came in doesn’t matter if it was the same day or a month before because we’re only concerned with the file date) it was filed on Thursday. What number would it get? 24? Uh, nooooo because 24 would have been assigned to a birth many days before. The only number it could have would be AFTER the one that was filed previously.