A Most Unusual Birth Certificate and How I Found It

When I start looking  for information about a particular family at a website such as ancestry.com or familysearch.org  I generally use three different search methods.  (For this example, I’m using  the Cook County records available at familysearch.org.)

For the first method,  I won’t have to give you much explanation.  I fill in the first names and surnames and possibly the birth information, or “live in” information for variety and see what shows up.  (Usually census information that gives me family members names and ages.)My second method is when I leave the names of people I’m searching for blank, and fill in just the parents names.  I did this for Joseph Mondry and Julia Rhodes.

 

There is quite  a variety of information about some of their children.  And this is the result I received.  You can see that the spellings vary greatly, especially surnames. 

 

 

One child was missing in this search, and that was their son, Edward, born 1903, Cook County, IL. From census information, I knew a little about him already, he had married, served in the military and had a couple of children.  To find his birth certificate, I used my third search method, which takes some time but does yield results.  I put in the first name of the child, and the year he was born. My search looks like this:

 

 

This meant that I had to look through pages and pages of Edwards (12 pages in all) who were born in 1903 until I found my Edward Mondry, who was listed as” Eddie Mandri.”  What I found was probably my most unusual birth certificate.  It’s below:

 

What information is incorrect on this birth certificate?  Well, a lot. 

Line #	Error	Correct Information
1 Name	Eddie Mandri	Edward Mondry
2 Sex	FEMALE	MALE
3 Number of child by mother	24	8
4 Date of birth	Year filled in later	1903
8 Mother’s Name	Julyanna Roda	Julia Rhodes
Date	29 Oct 1903	30 October 1903

Why so many errors?  One explanation is that during this time period, in Cook County, IL, midwives and doctors were required to report the births only once a month.  Most kept the information in a notebook (or in their heads,) and came to the county building to complete the required paperwork the end of each month This midwife came to the county office on October 30^th.   She seems to not remember the details of this birth, including gender.  She probably used the more gender-neutral name “Eddie”  to cover up the fact.  She was correct that he was the eighth child, so  she probably had the birth recorded in a notebook.

Most of the other errors a probably due to her lack of education or English.  The poor spelling throughout the document indicates she probably  had difficulty reading and filling out the document properly. 

Whit for White       Germyn for German      Mandri for Mondry

I am sure this is the birth document for the Edward Mondry that I was researching.  I found  his birthdate elsewhere.  I hope that Josepha Garich was a better midwife that a record keeper!

Many times I ponder how Edward dealt with this?  I wonder if he had to show the document when he signed up for the military. (Embarrassing.) Did he ever have to “prove” he was a male?  Surprisingly he and/or his parents did not file to correct the document, which was an option.   

Have you ever found a strange document?  Tell us about it!