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You know, back in those days, in the state where I lived, the official birth certificates had some other quite interesting information within the medical section—such as age of mother at first pregnancy, total number of mother’s pregnancies to date, number of stillbirths, number of children born alive but now deceased, number of children now living. So there were lots of goodies about mom, too. This information was gathered for the purpose of government vital statistics. It was never meant to be part of the certified copies given to people who requested their “birth certificate.” However, it was gathered, it was kept, it could be revealed again if a court should so order.

In addition, if a child was adopted in a closed adoption, the original birth certificate was retained and, at least where I lived, a new birth certificate was created, with the names of the adoptive parents on it AS IF they were the biological parents. (Sort of like Indonesian law at the time.)

So if the child was never told he was adopted, even if he got a certified copy of his birth certificate, there was no way for him to know the facts of his birth.

However, personnel in the Vital Records Dept. could tell he was adopted, just by looking at his copy of the birth certificate. How? Because of the way the BC# was coded. There was a way to interpret the number that would lead back to the BC# on the sealed, original birth certificate, which was kept in a special file. Nosy people who worked in Vital Records could go back into the sealed file and look up the information about the biological parents of any child who had been adopted, for example, by friends of theirs. I know about this because I knew an old biddy who did just that, and gossiped about her unethical, illegal behavior.

When Obama first released that COLB with the redacted BC#, I speculated that perhaps the reason he hid the number is because Hawaii might have used the same sort of numbering system, meaning that if the BC# was released, people who knew the coding system would immediately recognize that he had been adopted. I thought of this again when FactCheck blog wrote this in the now-infamous Born in the USA story:

“We asked the Obama campaign about the date stamp and the blacked-out certificate number. The certificate is stamped June 2007, because that’s when Hawaii officials produced it for the campaign, which requested that document and ‘all the records we could get our hands on’ according to spokesperson Shauna Daly. The campaign didn’t release its copy until 2008, after speculation began to appear on the Internet questioning Obama’s citizenship. The campaign then rushed to release the document, and the rush is responsible for the blacked-out certificate number. Says Shauna: ‘[We] couldn’t get someone on the phone in Hawaii TO TELL US WHETHER THE NUMBER REPRESENTED SOME SECRET INFORMATION [emphasis added] and we erred on the side of blacking it out. Since then we’ve found out it’s pretty irrelevant FOR THE OUTSIDE WORLD [emphasis added].’ The document we looked at did have a certificate number; it is 151 1961 - 010641.”

So what sort of secret information were they afraid of having revealed by the BC#? Maybe an adoption.

Maybe, as butterdezillion suspects, late completion of the birth certificate, causing the number to be far out of bounds for someone whose birth was registered on time.

Or maybe it’s both.

We already know that the BC# that’s been revealed doesn’t logically make sense because that COLB, if you believe it, says he was registered 3 days before the Nordykes, yet their BC#s come sequentially before his.