h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Continued from November 27th Journal.

So, big towns and cities send their events through the mighty internet.

Smaller towns and villages, though, still use paper forms.

We have specific time frames to enter them into the database.
The births are the most urgent, as the baby doesn't have a social security number until we've created it.
Deaths are a little less of an emergency, but as long as the person is still alive in our computers, their pension and other such rights are still valid, so it's a bit of a problem if social services have to ask money back from a widow because we weren't fast enough...
Weddings are not urgent at all, but the sooner the better.

We get very few paper forms concerning births, because most of them happen in hospitals, and those are in big towns that have computerized their systems.
But we do have a few every month, home births, that we type up into the software ourselves so they are taken into account as early as possible.
I once had a case where we were missing a birth from several months before, because the baby was born in the ambulance on the road between two villages, and noone was quite sure which village had to declare it. We did finally manage to get the baby's identity created, but it was a bit of an adventure...


Most of the paper we get is death forms.
If the time frame is good (which it is, most of the time), we send them to a firm that does automated reading : magical computers read the forms and enter them into the database, and they then return the forms to us for archiving.
And for checking too, because, as with the computerised files from the big towns, the machine doesn't always find the relevant person in the database. Maybe the name's spelt wrong, or the automated reader thingy couldn't decypher the birthdate.
So we check. That usually involves calling the city's civil status offices and asking for precisions or proofs.
90% of them go through just fine, though. *wipes brow*

When the deadline for integrating the death is too close we enter it manually the same way as births.


Weddings are treated the same, except there's no time frame for them, so whatever the date of the wedding, we send them in for automated reading.


Phone calls to the towns' offices is a whole story in itself, and shall be dealt with tomorrow.

Deb

[Amy P]

What if a visitor gives birth or dies in your area, or gets married on some exotic island? Must be a lot of duplicate filing

Genealogists have to contend with variant name spellings. Sometimes the same person can use several different spellings.

FWR, if a visitor gives birth or dies in France, we have to register it. Then the Consulate will inform their country of origin so that the people who take care of all the civil status affairs in that country are aware of the event.

We can have problems with people dying abroad. Sometimes, the French Consulate there doesn't know they have to tell us, so the person stays alive in the database. Which means we can't abolish their voting rights, stop the payment of their pension or put an end to their social security rights.
Sometimes the social services know about the death and tell us, but if we can't find a proof of death, an offical paper written in French, we can't "kill" the person in the database...

Paulh, that's another one of the points of my job. To make sure the person is registrered under their actual official name, without spelling mistakes.
Which is also one of the reasons we want the weddings too.

Reddit

Is the spelling ever converted into the French form of the name?

Any name change has to be validated by a judge.
Whether the person wants to Frenchicise their name or change it altogether, change their first name, or take the family name of their stepdad, it needs to be taken before a judge, who allows the change (or not).

Then the city of birth is notified, and they add a mention on the birth certificate, saying that by virtue of the judgement given on this and that day, this person is now officially named Paulh and not Paulg as they were before.

And then the town's offices notify us, send us a copy of the certificate, and we apply the change to the Database.


So we only convert the name if the person wants it and the judge has agreed to it. And there's still a mention in the database of what the previous name was.
That means a person can have a previous name, an official name, *and* a marital name in the database.

Thanks for explaining.

Thanks for asking.