State birth records for sharecropper families were systematically inaccurate.

Evidence

Around that same time, she was in the process of becoming a foster parent in Connecticut and needed her birth certificate for the application. My mother was born at home and, like many people born to sharecroppers, there was no documentation of her birth, so she had to send a sworn affidavit to the state of Alabama to request a birth certificate—and when she learned how long the process would take, she contacted her siblings to suggest that they do it all together, at the same time. When the package arrived in the mail, she was shocked to see that her legal date of birth was listed as December 23, 1923, three years earlier than she was born. My aunt Sarah’s birthday was also incorrect. Uncle John was misgendered. Everyone’s information was wrong. Since each child had been delivered at home in Mount Meigs by a midwife named Kizzy Ivery, it was decided that Kizzy just didn’t keep good records. My mom knew that proving her real birth date would be a labyrinthine and laborious process, so she decided to leave it be. — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 47

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why exactly were every sibling’s records wrong? A midwife’s poor records is the family’s explanation, but the pattern invites questions about of the state’s disinterest in accurately documenting Black births.
• SEED: This is a concrete, citable example of how the bureaucratic apparatus amplified rather than corrected genealogical erasure — strong supporting material for the reparations case argument.
• SHARE: Send to anyone writing about the state’s archival violence or the materiality of Black identity documents in the 20th century.
• XREF: connects to: Self-archiving families produce records that fundamentally mislead about their inner life — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 479