How important is a birth certificate in keeping family records? Let's say that you need the birth certificate of your grandfather who was born in Memphis, Tennessee. Let's say that you need the birth certificate...
Let's say that you need the birth certificate of your grandfather who was born in Memphis, Tennessee. You go online to www.vitalrecords.com and you click on Tennessee and it gives you the information of where to write, how much it costs, and what you have to put in your letter to receive a copy of that birth certificate. You don't need certified copies, those are expensive, you just want carbon copies.
You should be aware that more and more of the vital records are being closed to the public because of fraud and identity theft, it is very sad. So you may have to provide certain information that proves you are related to the person who's birth or death certificate you are requesting.
There is a tremendous amount of information on the web, but everybody has to bear in mind that that information is suspect until you yourself have been able to substantiate that the information is correct. So when you find some information online, maybe from someone else's family history work, you don't add it to your own work until you are satisfied that the preponderance of evidence says that this information is right and belongs to your family.
That's one of the differences between the genealogist and the family historian. A genealogist will never put out information without the source document substantiating it. A family historian might take oral information or pick something up off the web and they don't always check to be sure that it's right. It is not fair for us as family historians to give information that is wrong to someone else. If we don't know it's right then we either say it's a best guess or something along that line. We don't pass that on as fact to someone else.
