This was after 9/11. It took an act of Congress and an act of God to prove this 15 year old, 6'4”, size 14 foot, white boy with a mild case of acne was not a terrorist presenting a forged COLB from another state.
Armed with every bit of documentation I had to prove he was our son who had passed through my own birth canal 15 years ago, we were told at the SS Office it would take 6 months to research the COLB. They were nice, but their hands were tied.
I called our Congressman (who is now our Gov), faxed him all of the documentation and the process was shortened to 3 weeks. Until he became ‘official’ we called him Pedro (from Napoleon Dynamite).