Citing a CRBA certificate (not obtained from a repository)

By Samuel Shirley on Fri, 04/19/2024 - 10:34

Forums

I live in Ireland and my recently born son was registered as a US citizen via a CRBA (Consular Report of a Birth Abroad). It's evidence of US citizenship. It results in a certificate that looks like [removed].

Now, I am very familiar with citing records that come from repositories (BMD records). But this recently received ceritifcte was sent to us from the US Embassy. I did not get it from an archive. 

How can I best cite this record? I'm also using Family Tree Maker. 

Submitted byEEon Fri, 04/19/2024 - 11:04

Good morning, Samuel. Interesting document!  Following EE4’s Template 12: Birth or Death Certificate would give us this:

Layer 1: United States Department of State, Consular Report of a Birth Abroad, [Identifying number, Name, Date, Location of Birth];

Layer 2: supplied [date] by …

Incidentally, I removed the image you supplied before publishing this, since we would not want that image publicly available to bad actors.

Submitted byrtkoehleron Thu, 05/23/2024 - 16:37

I'm stumped on this one. 

My father has a Consular Report of Birth Abroad. However, there isn't really an identifying number. The certificate contains 4 serial numbers, none of which are labeled with an identifier such as "Certificate No." or "File No." None of them contain the year either, so that doesn't provide any clues.

Here is what I've come up with so far:

United States, Department of State, Consular Reports of Births Abroad, birth reported 29 December 1966 at Nassau, Bahamas (no certificate number), John Quincy Koehler; U.S. Department of State, Passport Services, Vital Records Section, Washington, D.C.

CRBA

Submitted byEEon Thu, 05/23/2024 - 18:05

rtkoehler, did you order this yourself or did you inherit this amid papers from your father? If you obtained it yourself, you should have additional information to include in your citation. If this came to you amid family papers, it's a family artifact that cannot be cited as a government document because you do not have sufficient information to identify how/where someone else can obtain an official government copy.

Certificates that are family artifacts are cited using Template 7: Private Holdings (Artifact or Manuscript Document). Also EE4's 4.24, 8.23 provides background discussions on these inherited certificates.

I obtained it myself in 2018. I remember at the time they did not have a standard application form to request a copy; they asked for a letter with all known information regarding the birth. I don’t have a copy of my original request.

However, when I looked up the current process for obtaining a CRBA, they now have a standard application form, and the form asks for, if known, the “Document Control Number” which starts with “159-” - so I now know which of the 4 numbers is attached to the record.