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Birth Certificates are an invention of the 20th Century. Prior to that, births were “registered” in a registry book either in the local church or in a government office. In England, this registration was done by the government beginning in 1837, prior to that local parishes maintained their own birth registries. Government registration of births in the U.S. was not common practice until after 1900. Many churches maintained birth registries, but it was not mandatory and varied by denomination. The Family Bible was the usual form of recording births in this country.

So, a birth certificate would have been unknown to the framers of the Constitution. You were either a natural born citizen or you were not and they would have thought it bizarre that someone would have to produce a piece of paper to establish that fact. Your family and your neighbors would know the truth of it and you could never hope to gain the support of Presidential electors unless the responsible citizens of your state attested to your Constitutional eligibility. If you were born abroad of an American parent, that fact would be well known.

Naturalized citizens, on the other hand, were required to sign a loyalty oath as a condition of citizenship and that document served as proof of your naturalization. Such documents were required to be recorded at the Courthouse. The only time that a birth was recorded at the Courthouse was when a birth became a cause for examination by the Bastardy Court held to determine parentage.

I find it comical that people are using a 20th Century construct to argue over the original Constitutional intent of the Natural Citizen Clause. Natural Born Citizens don’t need No Stinkin’ Documents, at least in the minds of the founding fathers.

Since the framers did not choose to define the term within the Constitution itself, only the Supreme Court can interpret its meaning as it specifically applies to Presidential eligibility, something they have yet to do. I doubt they ever will.

You were either a natural born citizen or you were not and they would have thought it bizarre that someone would have to produce a piece of paper to establish that fact.

Not so bizarre as you may think. Many thousands of men thought these pieces of paper would protect them from the British claims on their allegiance and servitude.

How did that work out?

Under the pretext of impressing British seamen, our fellow citizens are seized in British ports, on the high seas, and in every other quarter to which the British power extends, are taken on board British men of war and compelled to serve there as British subjects. In this mode our citizens are wantonly snatched from their country and their families, deprived of their liberty and doomed to an ignominious and slavish bondage, compelled to fight the battles of a foreign country and often to perish in them. Our flag has given them no protection; it has been unceasingly violated and our vessels exposed to danger by the loss of the men taken from them. Your committee need not remark that while the practice is continued, it is impossible for the U.S. to consider themselves an independent nation. Every new case is a new proof of their degradation. Its continuance is the more unjustifiable because the U. States have repeatedly proposed to the British government an arrangement which would secure to it the control its own people. An exemption of the citizens of the U.S. from this degrading oppression and their flag from violation, is all that they fought.