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My stepfather's family sent his oldest brother to the Army. Then they sent the next brother. That was enough. They needed the next three brothers at home to work the farm. The third brother pretended he was slow in the head and didn't speak any English. They sent him home. The fourth brother was my stepfather. Suddenly he was two years younger than he was, which took him from being 18 in 1945 to being 16, too young to draft. I don't know how this was done, but I know that when he and my mother decided to get all the documents straightened out and consistent, it was quite a job. The fifth brother was never in danger of being drafted.
No one ever really knew my maternal grandfather's birth date as he was born out in the country and there weren't any birth certificates. The best they had was his apprenticeship agreement, but he was already 12 or 14 years old when he signed that. Maybe he was already too old to be an apprentice, so he made himself younger to get the position? He was a small thin man so he may have been an undersize boy. Add to that the fact that he used various different names during his youth, and it was really a job for my grandmother to sort it all out for Social Security.
It occurs to me that my grandfather might have been close enough to draft age for WW I that he made himself younger to avoid the draft. Certainly we always suspected he was significantly older than his documents indicated.
People were not all so gung-ho to get drafted and be shot as popular history would have you believe, and this applies to both wars. There are a lot of tropes in popular history that just weren't true, or were true for certain segments only - like "all the married women in the 1950s were housewives" - well, my mother was a working woman, my grandmother was a working woman, and my great-grandmother was a working woman. If they hadn't worked, their families wouldn't have eaten.
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Originally Posted by turf3
My father was born with one surname, but when his mother left his father, the grandparents adopted him and gave him their name. I can't find out whether his older sister, my aunt, had her name changed. His older brother kept the other name and did not change, so you had two brothers (full brothers, not half brothers) with different surnames. When my father died, my aunt apparently got hold of someone at the bureau of vital statistics and had the death certificate altered, so for example the name of my grandfather is scratched out. I think this may have been because the brother - my uncle - was involved in some nefarious activities.
This whole concept of cradle-to-grave documentation is a new thing. People especially in the United States used to be a lot more loosey-goosey about this stuff. Who a man was, was basically who he said he was. If nothing intervened, you took him at his word.
I heard of a new one today. It's someone I've known since I was 10. She's adopted. I don't know at what age. They moved states during the adoption and the state messed up the day on the birth certificate. She has her real birthday and her legal birthday. Personally, I probably would have tried to make them correct the mistake.
My grandmother has a similar birth certificate problem. They misspelled her middle name. From what I can tell, grandma's parents couldn't read and write. They probably just didn't catch the mistake.
I heard of a new one today. It's someone I've known since I was 10. She's adopted. I don't know at what age. They moved states during the adoption and the state messed up the day on the birth certificate. She has her real birthday and her legal birthday. Personally, I probably would have tried to make them correct the mistake.
My grandmother has a similar birth certificate problem. They misspelled her middle name. From what I can tell, grandma's parents couldn't read and write. They probably just didn't catch the mistake.
When I got my first passport at 18, I had to get a certified copy of my birth certificate. When it came, it had my middle named spelled wrong, even through the "original" certificate had it spelled right. My mother and I went down to see how to get that changed. They pulled out the "original" on file (this was before everything was on computers) and someone had crossed out my middle name, wrote in the conventional spelling and dated it (it would have been when I was 14). My mother and I both had to go before an official and swear that neither of us had "changed" the spelling of my middle name in order to get it changed back.
My grandmother changed her birth year to be one year younger, and she more than likely would've taken away another year or two if her next younger sibling's birth wasn't in the way. You can tell that the last digit of her birth year was changed from 1891 to 1892 in the family bible. She did it because she was 25 when she married a 20 year old man, and hated the age difference. When Granddad died, she had a double tombstone made, and used 1892 as her year of birth. It wasn't until she turned 90 that she confessed to being a year older. By then, her advanced age had become a badge of honor.
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