Relationscapes: Exploring How We Relate, Love, and Belong
The Secret and Sometimes Sinister History of Our Birth Certificates (with Susan J. Pearson)
Jun 30, 2026 · 1 hr 23 min · 10 segments
Relationscapes: Exploring How We Relate, Love, and Belong
Jun 30, 2026 · 1 hr 23 min · 10 segments
Susan J. PearsonGuestBlair HodgesHostIt goes back a number of centuries to when churches were kind of the main place where someone's birth or life would be recorded.
But then you say there was a shift toward more secular record keeping that started emerging in the 1600s.
Your book doesn't spend a lot of time there, but I think it's helpful to see where that shift happened from church to state.
As you notice, I kind of go back to what historians call the early modern period.
And during this period, in a lot of the Western world, churches would have been the main sources.
Church records were maybe actually recording things like baptism and burial, which is a slightly different thing than birth and death, but they're close in proximity to one another.
And At that time, right, in Europe, most of the churches were also state churches, right? So even though churches were doing the registration, many nations had official state churches.
So there was some kind of relationship between these church records and state records, or one could say.
the church records could serve as kind of public state records when necessary.
And that began to change really in the 17th century when religious dissenters from England, the Puritans, left and came to what they considered the New World and landed in Plymouth, landed in Massachusetts, and created a commonwealth there.
And In their new commonwealth, they created the first system of civil registration in the Western world.
They were excited and concerned to have civil registration because as religious dissenters, their records of baptism and burial and marriage were were not recorded by the Church of England, by the Anglican Church, which had been established by Henry VIII in the 16th century.
And so they didn't have records that they could rely on when they needed to establish facts about themselves, when they needed to prove, say, lines of dissent for things like inheritance, or even to establish that couple was married and that their children were legitimate.
So they wanted a civil form of registration that would not discriminate based on religion in order to get your name and your family affiliations in whatever the official record books were.
It goes back a number of centuries to when churches were kind of the main place where someone's birth or life would be recorded.
But then you say there was a shift toward more secular record keeping that started emerging in the 1600s.
Your book doesn't spend a lot of time there, but I think it's helpful to see where that shift happened from church to state.
As you notice, I kind of go back to what historians call the early modern period.
And during this period, in a lot of the Western world, churches would have been the main sources.
Church records were maybe actually recording things like baptism and burial, which is a slightly different thing than birth and death, but they're close in proximity to one another.
And At that time, right, in Europe, most of the churches were also state churches, right? So even though churches were doing the registration, many nations had official state churches.
So there was some kind of relationship between these church records and state records, or one could say.
the church records could serve as kind of public state records when necessary.
And that began to change really in the 17th century when religious dissenters from England, the Puritans, left and came to what they considered the New World and landed in Plymouth, landed in Massachusetts, and created a commonwealth there.
And In their new commonwealth, they created the first system of civil registration in the Western world.
They were excited and concerned to have civil registration because as religious dissenters, their records of baptism and burial and marriage were were not recorded by the Church of England, by the Anglican Church, which had been established by Henry VIII in the 16th century.
And so they didn't have records that they could rely on when they needed to establish facts about themselves, when they needed to prove, say, lines of dissent for things like inheritance, or even to establish that couple was married and that their children were legitimate.
So they wanted a civil form of registration that would not discriminate based on religion in order to get your name and your family affiliations in whatever the official record books were.
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