Background info: This coming August I'll be 65 years old and a couple of my pensions will automatically kick-in, whether I want them to or not (I have a 3rd pension which I can defer until I'm 70 1/2). The oldest, from when I worked back in Michigan in the late 60's and 70's, and also the least valuable, is going to pay $140.63 a month starting this September. Well, I just got a letter from the pension administrator (my original employer has been acquired and split-up and sold off several times since I left them in 1980, and one of those entities ended-up with the pension responsibility and they're the ones I've been getting annual updates from for the last 10 years or so) offering me a second option.
While I can just sit back and wait for the checks to start arriving in September if i want, I've also been offered a lump-sum payout (which admittedly is about twice what I thought it would be when I was first notified a few weeks ago of this possibility).
To make a long story a bit shorter, I've decided to take the lump-sum and roll it over into some other type of account.
As part of the paperwork that I have to put together I need to include a copy of my birth certificate, which isn't a problem since I have a registered copy in my safe (they only need a simple Xerox copy of the official version). Anyway, looking at the document (which I hadn't had out in years) I noticed some of the questions which were asked and the information included. I then looked a copy of one of our son's BÇ to see how things changed in only 23 years (all the documents are from Michigan).
Well in 1947 they asked for the race/color of both parents. The martial status of the mother. The home addresses of both parents. As well as questions about whether the mother had been tested for syphilis or not, and if not, an explanation as to why not.
When our son was born in 1970, there were no marriage questions, no inquiry as to the race or color of the parents, no questions about testing for venereal diseases and interestingly enough, only details about the residential status of the mother (state, county and city of residence) while for the father, all they asked, other than the name and age, was the state or country of birth, but no other details.
Yep, times have changed.
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