A boy with a name

A feeling of dread rises up each time we face the prospect of having to deal with the bureaucracy of our old home country.  The same dread surfaced again particularly in my wife when she tried to register the baby and acquire his birth certificate.

Because of a minor clerical error in my marriage certificate, the births registrar would not accept the marriage certificate and indicated that we need to get this typo amended first.  The error involved my year of birth.  Just a year off of the correct one. 

After consultations with the consulate, the Manila parish where we got married, and the local civil registrars, we determined that we are facing the prospect of going through a torturously tortuous ten-steps-from-hell procedure :

http://www.census.gov.ph/data/civilreg/ten_steps.html

(To the clerk who made this typo nine years ago, thank you very much.)

We decided to instead appeal to the logic and common sense of the immigration officers here.  If they reject this marriage certificate, then my son is an illegitimate son, but then how about his brother and sister?  Will their status be changed from legitimate to illegitimate, since their own status, already established earlier, are based on exactly the same set of documents?  If their status will not be changed, then how do we explain the paradox of having two legitimate children and one illegitimate child based on exactly the same set of documents?

Fortunately, we did not have to try argue all these as we faced a different registrar who had enough sense to know that this particular clerical error is rather petty.  This officer focused on serving us even though the procedure went past the official office hours.

In the end, finally, our baby has acquired his new official name: Augustine Samuel.