The HDOH was only authorized to send announcements to the papers in 1976.
And the source cited in a Honolulu Advertiser article as saying that they got the birth announcements from the HDOH gave conflicting information from what Lori Starfelt said the HDOH told her. Starfelt was under the impression that there were only birth announcements in the Sunday paper because the HDOH told her they printed out a list at the end of the week. But the source for the Advertiser story said he went every day and picked up the lists.
Unfortunately for both those sources, there are birth announcements every day of the week, and the announcements that show up in one paper sometimes don’t show up in the other paper at all and sometimes show up 2-3 weeks later than in the other paper. 26% of registered births went unreported in the Star-Bulletin, for instance, according to an analysis of the August 1961 births reported in the Star-Bulletin compared to the number of Oahu births in August 1961 as reported in the 1961 CDC Natality Report.
The online images “conveniently” included exactly the same borders, hiding the fact that the Star-Bulletin which had Obama’s announcement actually included 28 other announcements which had not been included in the Advertiser page which had Obama’s announcement.
I say “conveniently” because not only did those online images have the same borders, the three different images of the Advertiser were the SAME SCAN even though the people who presented them said they got the copies independently. And the 2 Star-Bulletin images were the SAME SCAN even though one came from the Honolulu Advertiser office and the other came from someone who claimed to get it from the Hawaii State Library microfilms. Not only the borders match, but the scanning edges (waviness, etc) match.
So we’ve been fed a bunch of baloney on how the birth announcements got into the newspapers.
And if you read my recent posts you will see that Obama’s announcements did not appear in the papers in 1961 at all. They first appeared on paper forgeries which were scanned into digital form and posted online with a statement that they had come from the library microfilms. Some time after that, the library microfilms were changed out - inaccurately, since the resulting microfilms don’t match the online images.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for this post.
From what I can see in my quick search of your posts it appears that you have done quite a bit of looking into this. But I cannot see anything that puts your ideas all together. In particular I'm interested in images you think are important and why they are important. I'm interested in some speculation about how replacement of library microfilms might be accomplished, and also whether you think ALL original microfilms have been replaced.
ML/NJ