But we don’t know that, because - first off, we have no idea what was actually in the 1961 papers because the provenance of these images has been lied about and that wouldn’t be necessary if what we were shown was actually on the microfilm at the time.
And second, we don’t know which announcements came from the HDOH and which came from people self-reporting the births. In 1993 the Star-Bulletin had a statement under their “Vital Records” heading, clarifying that information from the HDOH would be in a certain format. If a person reported a birth in such a way that it was clearly an illegitimate birth the HDOH wouldn’t be accused of breaking the rules about not publishing information about illegitimate births. The only announcements that could definitely be known as being self-reported were the ones that didn’t follow the HDOH format, and those were sprinkled in among the others. So if somebody had a baby in China and then moved to Hawaii and reported the birth in the paper it would still appear as if it was an HDOH-reported birth as long as they gave the father’s name and the mother’s maiden name, just like the HDOH announcements. There would be no way to know the announcement hadn’t gone through the HDOH at all.
The “stragglers” in among the blocks of announcements that appear in the same order in both papers suggest that people were able to self-report, and that there is no way to know which are self-reported, since they all use the same Mr & Mrs format and nobody in 1961 would purposely report an illegitimate birth. So it seems like the same situation existed then as exists today - where it isn’t clear which announcements were from the HDOH and which weren’t.
So even if the announcements were in the original papers in 1961, it wouldn’t necessarily tell us anything. But the discrepancies in the stories regarding where the images containing Obama’s birth announcement actually came from raise serious questions about why the “researchers” didn’t just tell the truth. Or even better yet, just go to the HSL microfilms and actually make a real copy like they said they had done.
So really, all the newspaper announcements mean, is that somewhere, a child was born to such and such. It doesn’t mean that the child was born in Hawaii, just that the child was born.