This document from the National Center for Health Statistics describes the procedures for issuing birth, death, marriage, and divorce certificates in 1961. It specifies that:
- The physician, other health professional, or hospital authority is responsible for completing the entire birth certificate in consultation with the parents and that a physician’s signature is required. That same entity then filed the birth certificate with the local office in which the birth occurred.
- The local office, which may be a local registrar or city/country health department verifies the completeness and accuracy of the information on the certificate, makes a copy, ledger entry or index for local use and then forwards the certificate to the state registrar.
- The state registrar queries incomplete or inconsistent information; maintains files for permanent reference and as the source of certified copies; develops vital statistics for use in planning, evaluating, and administering State and local health activities and for research studies; compiles health related statistics for State and civil divisions of State for use of the health department and other agencies and groups; and prepares copies of birth, death, fetal death, marriage, and divorce certficates or records for transmission to the National Vital Statistics Division.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsus/vsus_1961_1.pdf
The document also provides a wealth of information about births by state, county, city, race, age of mother, etc. etc.
It was published in 1961 so it’s probably more authoritative than anything Janice Okubo says. Mrs. Nordyke’s theory doesn’t necessarily depend on “pre-numbered” certificates. If the hospital was issued a block of certificate numbers, they could have stamped the certificate numbers on the forms themselves.
The information from there should supplement what Okubo says has always been the case for Oahu birth certificates.
On page 232 of the document you cited as being more credible than Okubo it says:
“With few exceptions, records are numbered in the State offices of vital statistics as they are received from the local offices. The assignment of the last digit in the number is not selective, and the systematic sample of even-numbered records may be assumed to be unbiased. Furthermore, because the records are almost always in geographic order before numbering, twice the sample count of births occurrring in the great majority of counties in table 3-1 in Section 3 is virtually the same as the corresponding figure based on all records.”