[Borodog]

[ QUOTE ]
I was wrong. The first American president to be born in a hospital was Jimmy Carter.

But would you get a birth certificate even if you weren't born in a hospital? I think a lot of the records we have of when a person was born, at least in the west, come from baptismal certificates or other documentation that religious institutions have.

[/ QUOTE ]

Andy,

I believe that doctors were attending births as a precaution long before they largely moved into hospitals, and they may have been issuing birth certificates for quite some time. This is conjecture though.

How my grandfather's stillborn brother got a birth cirtificate has never been made clear to me, because I always thought a birth certificate is actually a certificate of live birth.

Edit: I went and checked Aunt Rita's information. Mystery solved; he wasn't stillborn. He died in infancy. [img]/images/graemlins/blush.gif[/img]