PX-2101
STATE VITAL RECORD
INVENTED FOR A FICTIONAL NEWSPAPER
Certificate of live birth, Mississippi, 8 January 1935 — certified copy
- Origin
- Mississippi State Department of Health
- Dated
- 1935; copy certified 2026
- Extent
- 1 pages
- Status
- accepted
- Redactions
- None of the name fields. The residential address of the family home is left as printed, being a museum.
Chain of custody
Ordered by this newspaper from the state in the ordinary way, on the ordinary form, for $34. Eleven days from request to envelope. Any reader may order the same copy and check our reading of the eleventh field; we have printed the fee and the office so that they can. The state's microfilm image is what we photographed.
Held by: They Buried, document room
Excerpt
[Field 11 — full name of child] The middle name is written with the common biblical spelling, not the spelling the parents used, and not the spelling that appears on four decades of this man's own paperwork afterwards.
Transcribed by the data desk. Line breaks follow the original. Bracketed matter is ours.
Editor's note
Filed as the plainest example in the vault of a category this newspaper keeps meeting: a document that settles a famous question, costs less than a meal, and has never been ordered by the people arguing about it.
Cited in
- A Clerk Misspelled It In 1935. He Kept The Mistake.Culture · Aug 10