The No. field up top is 2. Why so low? That field seems a more logical place to have a higher number like 47,044 on the Kenyan document. Depending how many entries are listed on each page of the B series for example, and this is page 5733, maybe it’s 8 or 9 listed per page and that was the 47,044th birth in the B series. But 2 in that field? As I joked in another forum it’s like this guy was on Gilligan’s Island and the Skipper got assigned 1 and Gilligan got 2 at the lagoon registry office. It seems too low a number.
Okay, that IS very curious. But a little bit of digging on the web comes up with a reason.
Although Hindmarsh apparently contains quite a large stadium, it appears to be a very minute subdivision of the Adelaide area. In terms of actual residents who live there, multiple sources give the 2006 Hindmarsh population as 127.
But we're not done here yet. The father is listed as living in Thebarton, another neighborhood which is literally across the street from Hindmarsh. Recent population of Thebarton is 1,327.
But those are RECENT stats. What was the population of these areas in 1959? Fifty years ago? Probably much lower. In 1866, it was 450. Maybe 700 in 1959?
So let's maybe throw in West Hindmarsh, and estimate a 1959 population of 1,000 for the lot.
Out of 1000 residents (presumably approximately 500 females of ALL ages), how many will give birth in a given year?
If the average female bears approximately two children, and lives to be 75, the odds of the average female bearing a child in a given year are about 2 out of 75.
Work this out, and you'll see we might expect an AVERAGE of 12 or 13 children to be born in Hindmarsh district each year. Some years it would be more, some would be less.
Suddenly it becomes much less mysterious that David, born 3-1/3 months into the year, is child #2. More typically we would expect him to be child #3 or child #4, but having child #2 or child #5 - based on the stats we have - for Hindmarsh district in mid April would not seem to be at all unusual.
So once again, what at first appears to as if it might be an anomaly on the Aussie certificate, looked at more closely, checks out.
As an aside, does this mean a number of 44,677 (or 44,077) is improbable for Mombasa? Not necessarily. Mombasa is a huge city, with 700,000+ population. And the numbering might be from the beginning of their records rather than per year, per district.
On Bomford the 5733 looks noticeably crisper than other numbers in the vicinity. These anomalies suggest Photoshopping in the smoking gun fields needed to incriminate the Kenyan document.
I read it differently. On the Kenyan doc, the 5733 is so blurry you really can't even positively ID it as a 5733. As for its being darker than some of the other letters (I presume you have 10th April, 1959 as a reference), I think I have an idea about that.
I've tried typing on an old manual typewriter. A lot of what you accomplish is due to finger strength, and it varies by finger. All of the 5, 7, and 3 keys are struck by strong fingers. The 1, 0 and 9 are all struck by weak fingers. Moreover, the typist would have first spaced, then struck the 4 single characters very deliberately, versus flying over words like "HINDMARSH" etc. at a higher rate of speed.
Nonetheless, the simple fact is that there was variation in darkness of type on the old manual typewriters. This can be clearly seen in the word "Community" just below the "5733" - it's uncontested and is equally dark.
In fact, if you examine the word "Community," it shares the exact same characteristics as "5733." If we assume "5733" was Photoshopped on the basis of its crispness, then we must also assume the word "Community" was Photoshopped... but that other words in the same phrase were not.
Since that leads to an obvious absurdity, I conclude that the premise must be wrong.
It ought to be possible to find out, definitively, since unlike Kenya or Hawaii one presumes Adelaide, Australia and its suburb Hindmarsh, would be willing to engage in massive transparency here. Their registry office doesn’t even have to confirm anything specific about Bomford. Just have two or three officials up the chain of authority there tell us what period Book 44B spans and how many page numbers it has. If April 10, 1959 and Page 5733 falls within that, the Kenyan document is forged and the lawyer was almost certainly set up by her source.
Yes, I agree. Someone rather authoritative ought to contact Adelaide.
By the way, don't think that because I disagree with some of your conclusions I regard them as not valuable. On the contrary, you've made some very good points here.
Oh, and welcome to FreeRepublic! I hope you enjoy and benefit from your reading and interaction here. :-)
Note there’s an obvious weakness here: I’m assuming Hindmarsh is a small district only consisting of Hindmarsh, Thebarton, and maybe West Hindmarsh.
However, this probably isn’t as much of a weakness as it might seem at first. If the district is NAMED “Hindmarsh,” and Hindmarsh only has 127 people (recent census), then it stands to reason that the Hindmarsh district is very small indeed.
If it weren’t, it would be named after some place other than Hindmarsh.
Well, it was a page on Walton that was originally linked to and it had several Hindmarsh birth references, probably more than half the 12 I checked. The others I got from a few threads of that volunteer who was checking for people, and all 12 were in that 1900-1928 period. If I’d checked throughout the site I’m sure I’d have found a lot more, and only a small fraction of people would be online searching.
So I’d still find it difficult to believe that by April 10th, 1959 and page 5733 of Book 44B there were only 2 births in Hindmarsh District. At that rate there were maybe 10 all year in 1959, while I could probably find 10 Hindmarsh some years in that 1900-1928 period just on the site.
The darkness of Community varies by letter, but it is letters and I was comparing numbers to numbers.
I have another post that hasn’t seemed to appear yet but I’ll wait to see if it does before reposting. I guess there’s a delay because I’m a new poster. The post had a draft of an email I sent because I did find a site and email address to send it to just a few minutes after I made the initial post and checked. I’d let whoever you freepers decide on know so they could contact them directly and not have to rely solely on my reporting of any response, but the site said it could take up to 5 days to respond to requests.