----------------------------------------------------------------------

Subject: Registered birth/marriage/death dates/years in Kalisz
From: "David W. Perle" <dwperle@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 5 Oct 2013 14:49:31 -0400
X-Message-Number: 1

Hi, all.

I wondered if I could gain some insight into recorded dates of
birth in Kalisz records. (Specifically birth records, but actually,
now I'm wondering if this might affect marriage and death dates as well?)

I understand that it was common for birth records to not necessarily be
submitted to the registrar right away, and in fact families might submit
records for a few years' worth of births all at once. Now, I've
seen disputed years of birth for a great-grandfather of mine, sometimes
suggested 1876 and others 1877. One record is his United States WWI-era
draft-registration card (which bears his signature, no less, so you'd
think this might be conclusive), indicating birth on December 16, 1876.

I found his birth record recorded apparently exactly at the same
time as those of three of his siblings, in the 1877 records.
(The ledger contains the four birth records written one after the other.)
I haven't gotten his siblings' records translated yet (hardly priority
just yet), but his shows that his birth record was added in April 1877,
indicating his birth a week earlier.

Knowing what I know about families taking their time to submit this
information, and with his and these three siblings' records having
apparently been submitted all at the same time in 1877, I'm guessing
that they made up the birth dates because perhaps it was law to submit the
records more immediately after birth, though I'd assume it wasn't such a
tightly-enforced law but they'd just make up the dates of birth so as to
give the impression of compliance? So, might the United States WWI-era
draft-registration card (again, bearing his signature), be more trustworthy
of a source indicating birth on December 16, 1876, rather than this April
1877 record?

Additionally, this gets me wondering about his father's 1849 birth
record. Might that also indicate an incorrect date of birth, even
perhaps an incorrect year of birth?

=And how about marriage and death records? Did the same slowness in
registering these things apply with those as well? Should we not
trust those marriage and/or death dates?

It had initially seemed pretty cool that my great-grandfather--my
namesake--Dawid Wolf Perle was born in 1877, because I was born in
1977. My father is named after HIS father, Sender Perle, also each
supposedly born exactly 100 years apart, 1849/1949. However, it seems
to me that my namesake was probably born 101 years before I was and
now I'm wondering if the same thing applies to my dad=92s namesake. :)

David Perle