As far as I can ascertain from the information supplied, in August 1997, Ms U. Batchelder-K applied for her father’s birth certificate and received certificate No. 201077.
Due to a spelling error in the surname, a corrected copy was requested, and in September 1997 corrected certificate No.496408 was issued.
This certificate is Entry No. 259/1906. It is for a male child; surname BATCHELOR; NO CHRISTIAN NAME; born 21 Jan 1906, Woodstock.
Now looking at the older birth certificate No.66774, issued in December 1942, we see that it is the exact same Entry No. 259/06. It should therefore contain the exact same information, BUT it does NOT - half of the information is different.
We now have the different surname BATCHELDER, and we have the added Christian names FREDERICK WARREN.
The date of birth, and the place of birth remain the same however.
This certificate does not give the names of parents. If it had done so, Frederick (alive in 1942, and before ill-health) would have immediately picked up the error. As it was, he probably didn’t care too much that the printed date of birth was just 10 days out.
I suspect that there was sloppy work (a clerical error) made, either right back in 1906 upon registration, or by the registrar in 1942 when issuing the certificate. It has also been suggested to me that there may have been an attempted cover-up for this sloppiness on the part of registry clerical staff who possibly did not care to be contradicted.
Since the birth dates for “Nameless BATCHELOR” and “Frederick Warren BATCHELDER” only differ by 1 digit (21-01-1906 AND 31-01-1906), they possibly followed each other in the entry book. A cleric seeing the two entries believed they were for the same person because both the surname and birth date were almost identical, and the careless cleric has combined information from 2 different entries, into 1 birth certificate.
I believe information on certificate No.496408, issued in Sept 1997 is correct, however this is for the un-named child of the BATCHELOR family from Hull, England. This is the wrong family (as demonstrated previously). It is NOT the certificate for your father, Frederick Warren BATCHELDER, son of Arthur Asher BATCHELDER and Sophie Margaret.
In 1997, Ms U. Batchelder-K may have assumed the birth date from the old 1942 certificate was correct, and quoted that date when applying for her father’s birth certificate. Thus she has ended up with the birth certificate for the wrong person.
Had she applied for the birth certificate of Frederick Warren BATCHELDER born 31-01-1906, she may have received a different certificate.
I hypothesise that there is the correct birth record still out there to find, and consultation by phone with the SA registry office might be necessary. Note the spelling of the surname, and the date of birth on Frederick Warren BATCHELDER’s death certificate – which (at a later date and in a different hand) has been annotated as “correct” – almost as if it has been checked against other documentation. Death cert snip posted below.
For additional verification, it might be prudent to obtain the birth certificate for Frederick’s sister who died in 1922 -- Elizabeth Naomi BATCHELDER born 17 May 1903. We know from the baptism register that she had the same father (Arthur) and mother (Sophia) as Frederick Warren.
The birth certificate for brother Edward James BATCHELDER would also be of interest to you. As we don’t have a baptism record for him, we cannot be so certain that his mother was also Sophia. You may well find he was the child from another partner.
