http://cliotropic.org/blog/talks/undocumented-citizens-aha-2010/
State offices were overwhelmed partially because most of them had only existed for a few decades; modern compulsory birth registration systems in the US were generally a Progressive-era reform designed to generate more precise infant mortality numbers.
They were woefully incomplete in most states until the 1920s or early 1930s. Someone who was 25 years old in 1941 was born in 1916, when less than one-third of the American population lived in a state which registered 90 percent or more of each year’s births.20 By 1922, only 29 states met that 90 percent standard, which was set by the US Census Bureau in 1915 to encourage better state birth registration laws.21
Georgians who needed birth certificates during the early 1940s were coping with the unexpected consequences of government decisions made during the 1910s. Until 1914, their elected officials hadn’t thought birth registration was important enough to bother passing a compulsory registration law. The statute didn’t go into operation until 1919. Moreover, in 1924 the state supreme court struck down the law as unconstitutional, and it wasn’t until 1927 that a functional birth registration law actually went into practice. So Georgia’s 21-year-olds in 1940 might have had birth certificates, but older people didn’t unless they were born in a city that had its own birth registration law.17
