A note on keeping accurate records of births in birth registers

(Regarding the article: S. Grigorevsky: about metrical records of births and baptisms in general and in particular about the entry into metrical registers of births and baptisms of illegitimate children. Church. Vedomosti. No. 42). Regarding the repeated cases of incorrect entries in one way or another in the parish registers of births, and especially regarding the law of June 3, 1902, by which the “illegitimate” is decisively expelled from our official documents, Mr. Grigorevsky considered it necessary to “resurrect in the memory of the parish clergy all that order, all those rules that should guide the compilation of parish records of births and baptisms.” In the reproduced series of laws, of course, the one remains in full force according to which children born during the life of the husband, or born less than 306 days after the death of the husband, are recorded as his children. In practice, this law nowadays, with the frequent, legally permitted separation of spouses, often serves as a reason for completely false records. Meanwhile, the metric record must, of course, certify only the true fact and not contain any lies. The point is this: The wife lives for a long time “in a separate way” away from her husband, for whom all access to her “separate hearth” is cut off; she gives birth to children who, completely without the knowledge of the husband, are entered in his name in the birth registers: and the result is offspring - impostors of his surname, legally strengthening their imposture, and the husband must helplessly come to terms with this result. The metrical record, which is supposed to help reveal truths, in reality serves as a cover for it and a legal strengthening of lies. Therefore, there is an urgent need to eliminate this shortcoming of the current legislation on this subject, which can, in our opinion, be done quite easily, and precisely in the following way. Based on the provision that the current law authorizes “clergy and clerics, in order to avoid mistakes, then (i.e. immediately after recording the birth and baptism of a baby) to invite those who participated and were present (at the performance of Holy Baptism) to review the accuracy of the testimony and testify to this on the very metrics” (Vol. IX, Art. 872; Constitution of the Spirit. Con. Art. 100), - it is quite logically easy to come to the conclusion that they have the right to invite the wife’s husband, the mother, who lives separately from him on a “residence permit”, but who is not legally divorced from her, to review the metric record. But how can clergy and church ministers exercise such authority? The way to do this seems to be as follows: 1) Make it an obligation for clergy and church ministers to ensure that when recording births and baptisms in the column about parents, they accurately and certainly enter: “Legitimate wife No., living in a separate form in cohabitation with her husband, issued from the No. No. of the public office.” 2) Suggest to such a mother: does she want to demand from her husband his written consent to put his name in the birth register as the father of a newborn baby? The consequences of such a proposal could be as follows: 1) the mother’s decisive refusal of the demand she addressed to her husband; 2) negative response from the husband; 3) his answer is positive; 4) the absence of any statement regarding his non-location of residence. And in the last column of the registry book under the heading: “Assault on witnesses of the recording at will,” let the clergyman indicate certain consequences of the proposal he made to the baby’s mother to require consent from her husband, approximately in the following formulas: 1) The mother of baby No. resolutely refused the proposed message to her husband about the birth of her baby. 2) A written statement was received from husband No. about his unwillingness to be recorded as a father. 3) A statement was received from husband No. No. about his desire to be registered as a father. N.B. in the second and third cases, the husband’s written statement is also attached to the certificate. 4) The husband’s statement No. No. is not available due to the obscurity of his place of residence, or due to the failure to receive a response from him to the demand sent to him. The very insignificant modification of the current legislation that we are projecting, completely corresponding to the spirit and letter of it, would completely eliminate the above-mentioned shortcoming of our metric books, and would turn them into completely accurate records of actual facts.