Based on what Janice Okubo has said, there were pre-printed forms that had only the 151 (apparently the code for birth records) printed on them. Those were at the hospitals and at the local registrar’s office. When a child was born at a hospital the BC was filled out at the hospital and the hospital submitted it to the local registrar. If it was an unattended birth the parents could report the birth, with a doctor examining the baby within the first month and completing the BC. Or, if the parents couldn’t/wouldn’t report it, anybody could report the birth to the local registrar and he/she would try to get the needed informaton and documentation.
For Kapiolani the pattern seems to be that they submitted their BC’s to the local registrar on Fridays.
Both Okubo, the probable HDOH Administrative Rules at the time, and the CDC’s 1961 Natality Report agree that the local registrars collected BC’s over a period of time (the rules say a week) and then submitted them to the state DOH office, where they were assigned a state number. The current HDOH Administrative Rules say that the assignment of a number is how the state’s acceptance of the BC is represented.
Okubo says that the “date filed” on COLB’s that are printed out means the day that the BC was received at a HDOH office, which was almost always the same day as it was given a state number, since most births were on Oahu. For other islands, the BC’s were to be collected for a month and then sent by air mail to the state registrar’s office on the 4th of the month. Because there was mailing time involved the date that the local registrar on the island filed the BC and the date that the BC was given a state number at the state registrar’s office were different.
So what Okubo was saying was that the Oahu local registrars collected BC’s for a week and then processed them and sent them on the same day to the state registrar’s office where it was filed and given a number on the same day.
Thanks Butter.
Based on the info you provided, I’m still trying to determine when the form would be submitted to registrar and where it would have been when SAD and Dr. Sinclair signed the document. It would be helpful to try to pin down whether the medical center typed the data or the registrar.
If Kapiolani tended to submit BC’s to the registrar on Friday’s, then this must have been an exception since Obama was supposedly born on Friday (Aug. 4) and Stanley signed the document on Monday (Aug. 7). The DOH processed the document on Tuesday (Aug. 8).
Do you know if the local registrar’s offices were in the hospitals or if these were separate? As someone has already posted, there doesn’t appear to be any other BC’s that originated from Kapiolani and were signed by U.K.C Lee. This adds another potential layer of mystery.
And if the registrars collected a number of BC’s before submitting to the HDOH, we would hope to have other BC’s with the same Aug. 8 registration date but so far I have seen none. This is either a lack of ample data or indicative of some special treatment used on this BC.
An interesting “coincidence” is that on the Nordyke twins BC it shows the Attendant signing the same day as the registrar (Aug. 11) just as was done on Obama’s (Aug. 8). This seems to imply that the registrar was either in the hospital or very near by.
So perhaps the delay of the Nordyke twins registration was due to the Attendant (doctor) being away from the office since the twins had been born on Saturday (Aug. 5). And the Nordyke’s mother signed the BC the same day as SAD (Aug. 7).
Still many unanswered questions...