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Civil status, and particularly birth certificates, rather than identity papers, are the legal basis of identification in France. Its nineteenth-century history presents a complex picture, which cannot be reduced to a process of increasing state control. Far from implementing ambitious registration projects, French liberal administration left information scattered and scarce as compared to European standards. It had to find a balance between the need to provide open information in order to minimize uncertainty in social and economic relationships, and the protection of personal and family honour and reputation. Citizens' agency and consent have been determinant in this process, whose traces are still visible in contemporary France.

This chapter begins in the early nineteenth century, when Americans relied upon private documents, most often family Bibles, to record and prove their dates of birth. Shane Landrum argues that the push for universal birth registration came from late-nineteenth-century reformers seeking to improve public health and child welfare. By the 1910s, municipal and state governments had developed compulsory birth registration systems that provided a new generation of Americans with documentary proof of their ages in the form of birth certificates. Because the issuing of birth certificates grew out of public health efforts, however, access to these documents varied by region, race, and local political cultures. Until well into the twentieth century, many Americans from the South, Southwest, and rural West, especially those who were nonwhite or Spanish speaking, lacked documentary proof of age.

The central argument of How We Became Our Data is that over the past century we have become informational persons whose lives are increasingly conducted through an information politics. This chapter tracks emergent informational persons in the contexts of the bureaucratizing paperwork of the standardized birth certificate in the United States. Haphazard at the turn of the last century, the standardization of birth registration took three decades of effort beginning in 1903, and involved a panoply of agencies including the Census Bureau, the Children’s Bureau, the American Medical Association, and the American Child Health Association. The project was considered completed when, in 1933, every state was registering 90 percent of its births. Shortly after the development of the informational infrastructure that made this early ‘Big Data’ project possible, the Social Security Board would assign Social Security numbers to more than 90 percent of eligible American workers in just three months in the Winter of 1935. Building on the work of political scientist James Scott, this chapter attends to the formats of birth certificates and standard registration in order to excavate the informational conditions at the heart of the most important moments of registration in the lives of Americans today.

The birth of the child in transnational commercial surrogacy leads to a protracted process of staking claim. In this chapter, the focus is especially on the national and international laws that are invoked by foreign parents and foreign consulates to grant citizenship to the newborn. The applications for citizenship from their home countries, and the exit visa from India lead to many processes of bureaucratic verification and authentication of the genetic tie between the child and the intended parent(s) and the surrogate mother. Seeking identity here are both the new parents and the newborn. Through the birth certificate and the DNA test paternity is identified, while a parallel process seeks to ascertain maternity through the surrogate mother—who incidentally has rejected her tie to the newborn as part of the contractual requirements! Through the narratives of three foreign nationals navigating the citizenship process—international laws regarding surrogacy, kinship and citizens are analysed.

This chapter examines whether transsexuals and people with an intersex condition should be allowed to create their own legal identity through the use of the name and sex indicator they choose on their official documents, such as birth certificates, passports, and driver's licenses. It considers the statutes and court decisions that address sex amendments and their implications for people seeking to change the name and sex designation on their official documents. Most states allow birth records and other identity documents to be amended so that the name and sex indicator correspond to the person's gender self-identity. Other states, however, do not allow identity documents to be modified to reflect a sex or name change. Thus, people may have some of their official documents indicate that they are male, while other documents indicate that they are female. This chapter also analyzes the reasons used by government agents to force people to carry official documents that do not accurately reflect their self-identified name and gender.

This chapter examines the importance of the application form for the reliable identification of an individual that the United States passport promised. More specifically, it explains how the application form transformed the passport into a document that confirmed individual identity and verified citizenship. The chapter first considers attempts to standardize the application process through preprinted forms, official documentary evidence, and designated officials before turning to a discussion of the partial reach of the state in the passport application process. It then assesses the public's role as an “official stranger” in the application process, along with the use of witnesses, in the form of notaries public and citizens, to verify the personal identity of all applicants. It also analyzes the demand for a birth certificate to enhance the reliability of documents and the ranking of the alternative evidence of citizenship.

This chapter examines whether transsexuals and people with an intersex condition should be allowed to create their own legal identity through the use of the name and sex indicator they choose on their official documents, such as birth certificates, passports, and driver's licenses. It considers the statutes and court decisions that address sex amendments and their implications for people seeking to change the name and sex designation on their official documents. Most states allow birth records and other identity documents to be amended so that the name and sex indicator correspond to the person's gender self-identity. Other states, however, do not allow identity documents to be modified to reflect a sex or name change. Thus, people may have some of their official documents indicate that they are male, while other documents indicate that they are female. This chapter also analyzes the reasons used by government agents to force people to carry official documents that do not accurately reflect their self-identified name and gender.

This book concludes with a discussion of Manifisto (2013), a video-performance by the Dominican artist Polibio Díaz. Manifisto is a social commentary on the issue of Haitian immigration in the Dominican Republic, highlighting the systematic discrimination that ‘an underclass non-citizen’ has to endure due to ‘the institutional policy of the Junta Central Electoral’. It shows the importance of a birth certificate in the Dominican Republic in terms of name, nationality, citizenship, and access to health care and education, among other rights and privileges. Díaz also tackles the continuities and correspondences between Haiti and the Dominican Republic on one hand, and between the demonised borderland and the urban capital, on the other. The book also examines various responses to the Dominican Constitutional Court's ruling on citizenship and reiterates its position that the road towards a better Hispaniola requires engaging fully with the present and accepting the idea that an acceptable future can be attained.

Beyond their work as maternity care practitioners lay midwives fulfilled a crucial role in public health and this chapter describes their value as an extension of the state board of health. From their authoritative position in the community midwife clubs were extremely influential in organizing vaccination drives and education campaigns. The chapter discusses the state’s reliance on midwives to gather vital statistics, and the importance and consequences of submitting a birth certificate after each delivery.

This chapter examines the experiences of three bureaucratic organizations as they struggle with the application of electronic signatures to real estate contracts, birth certificates, and land titles. It suggests that the divergent routes in the computerization of these documents highlight the need to pay attention to the specific material conditions and institutional contexts that govern the production of written evidence. It also argues that the technical conditions necessary for the long-term legibility of electronic documents present a serious challenge to the forensic value of cryptographic signature verification.

This chapter considers the controversy over Spielberg’s true age. Spielberg’s birth certificate shows that he was born at Cincinnati’s Jewish Hospital on December 18, 1946—not December 18, 1947 as has often been reported. On October 26, 1995, in response to questions prompted by the lawsuit of his former producer Denis C. Hoffman, Spielberg’s attorney Marshall Grossman and his spokesman, Marvin Levy, acknowledged to the Los Angeles Times that “the director was born in 1946, and that any references to 1947 are incorrect.” But they both refused to explain why Steven never corrected it, or why he lists it incorrectly in documents such as his driver’s license.

This chapter looks at the prerogative state in more detail. The whole of the German legal system, it shows, became an instrument of the political authorities. It looks at the birth certificate case in Germany at that time where hundreds of birth certificates were issued in accordance with the provisions of the law. Normal life, it explains, was ruled by legal norms. The chapter then questions the history and the notion of the totalitarian state and relates it to the case of late 1930s Germany.