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A person really needs to closely compare the 2 newspapers to see that there is no apparent rhyme or reason to the order that the birth announcements show up in the papers. If the order of the birth announcements in the papers was according to BC# how would you get somebody being listed 3 weeks later in one newspaper than in the other? Or - like the Nordykes - listed 3 days later than the other kids who were supposedly born at Kapiolani on Aug 4-5 but only in one paper and not listed at all in the other paper?

It sounds like this guy’s source is trying to say that there was one list that the HDOH put out - a list of names in the order of their BC#’s. And the newspapers just printed that list verbatim so that when you look at the announcements in the papers you could number off the kids’ BC#’s based on the order that they appear in the announcements. That’s just not true. It is observably not true, and it makes me wonder what source would have told him that and why.

There are blocks of names. I’ve analyzed the specific names in the lists for a couple weeks in August 1961. I have a colleague who has done that for all of August and half of September of 1961 so as to catch all the straggling announcements for August births. Ladysforest has done a stretch of 10 days (?) as well (correct me on that if I’ve remembered incorrectly, LF)

What we see is that you might have 5 names that show up in the Star-Bulletin on the 6th that show up in the same order in the Advertiser a couple days, a week, or 3 weeks later. Right below that block of names in the Star-Bulletin for the 6th you might have a couple names that don’t ever show up in the Advertiser. Then right below that you’ll have another chunk of names that show up in the same order in the Advertiser a couple days, a week, or 3 weeks later. Followed by a couple names that don’t ever show up in the Advertiser. And so on.

And in the Advertiser you’ll have the same pattern: blocks of names that show up sometime in the Star-Bulletin (anywhere from a day to 3 weeks apart), interspersed with a few straggling names that never show up in the Star-Bulletin. The Nordyke name is one of the stragglers in the Advertiser; it never shows up in the Star-Bulletin.

It is true that BC#’s are given by the HDOH office and that the local registrars were supposed to collect BC’s for a week and then deliver that entire week’s BC’s at the end of that week. For Kapiolani, there is a pattern of the BC’s being delivered to the HDOH on Fridays. For the Wahiawa Hospital, which largely serviced military families, they seem to have been delivered on Tuesday. It would make sense that the hospitals/local registrars would deliver their BC’s on different days, so there was a steady stream of BC’s coming in rather than a deluge of BC’s all on the same day. All BC’s outside Oahu were to be mailed out to the HDOH on the 4th day of the month.

It is true that Obama’s “date filed” doesn’t work for it to be a Kapiolani birth, because it was “filed” at the HDOH on a Tuesday, whereas other Kapiolani BC’s for that week (such as the Nordykes’) were filed on Friday. So I agree with that author that Obama’s BC# doesn’t jive with his claim that he was born at Kapiolani. But the birth announcements could not tell a person any of that, because the order of the birth announcements is different in the different papers - so the order in the papers cannot be reflective of the BC#’s.

Right now I don’t know what explains what is seen in the newspapers. If there were lists put out by either the hospitals or the HDOH it doesn’t make sense that some names would appear 3 weeks later in one paper than in the other.

The stragglers strongly suggest that the hospitals asked parents whether to put the announcement in one or both paper, OR that the announcements actually just came from the parents putting the announcement in the paper of their choice.

But right now it seems that we have claims from 3 different “knowledgeable sources” in Hawaii (what Starfelt says the HDOH told her, what Will Hoover told me a “copy boy” told him, and what this researcher says his source told him) that all contradict each other, and none of them explains what can actually be seen in the newspapers. In addition, we’ve got WND’s source and what Starfelt claims the HDOH told her both saying that people could not put announcements in the paper voluntarily, and we’ve got Polarik saying that he contacted the sales manager at the Star-Bulletin classifieds, who said that parents have called or mailed in their own birth announcements all the time. If so, you’d expect to see lots of duplicates in the papers if the HDOH automatically gave the list to the newspapers and then the parents also sent in their announcement on their own. Yet I only remember seeing one duplicate in all of August 1961.

IOW, it seems an awful lot like we’ve got some disinformation going on. Who’s telling the truth and who’s not, I don’t know. But none of this adds up.

In 1976 the HDOH Administrative Rules were changed so that not only were lists of vital events supposed to be posted at the HDOH office (as they had always been posted), but lists were to be made and sent to the newspapers for publication - leaving out illegitimate births. The retention schedule shows that these lists piled up quickly, because in 1980 it was decided that those should be kept for a year but in 1981 they changed their minds to say they would only be kept for a month. The first mention of those lists was in 1980. There had been no retention period for those documents before that because they only started creating those documents in 1976.

The HDOH had a delicate situation trying to deal with illegitimate births, because they were not allowed to release embarrassing information such as an illegitimate birth. By 1993 the Star-Bulletin included under their heading of “Vital Records - Births” a clarifying statement, that information released by the Department of Health would include the father’s name and the mother’s maiden name. That way there was no way of knowing whether or not the mother and father were married to each other. That also would make it so that an announcement that showed only the mother’s name, for instance, would be known to be a submission from the mother herself and was not the HDOH violating the rule of not disclosing illegitimate births. And there were announcements that were obviously put in by the mother because they didn’t follow that format.

There could also have been people who submitted their own announcements using the HDOH format, which for that reason would appear to be HDOH-validated BC’s but which could actually just be a parent reporting a birth that had happened anywhere in the world. There would be no way to tell which had been reported by the HDOH and which hadn’t, but the HDOH was definitely saying that illegitimate births were NOT reported by them.

The same situation was true in 1961. There is no way of knowing which of the birth announcements came from the HDOH (if any) and which came from self-reporting by the parents. In 1961 a person probably wouldn’t self-report an illegitimate birth and the HDOH was not allowed to publicly post information about an illegitimate birth. That is why the announcements all say “Mr. and Mrs.”. The HDOH had no reason to want to clarify which announcements were from them at that time because there weren’t any illegitimate births self-reported so the HDOH was not in danger of being accused of breaking the rule forbidding disclosure of illegitimate births. By 1993 that had changed.

But the “Vital Records” heading in 1993 clearly does not mean that all the births listed were reported by the HDOH. And there is no reason to assume that the “Vital Records” heading in 1961 meant that either.

Long story short, some or all of the sources are lying to us about how birth announcements were placed in the papers in 1961. The stories don’t match each other OR what is observable in the papers.

Sorry this is so long.