My computer has been down, so I’m just posting this now.
671 miles. According to what I can see on Google, that is the shortest distance by road from Ajax, where I live, to the Registrar-General’s office in Thunder Bay Ontario.
On the Friday before Thanksgiving last October, the Ontario government quietly announced new requirements for changing the gender on one’s birth certificate. It took about a month for me to save the $97 fee, so it was late November before I sent off my application. 671 miles.
According to information on the form it would take about three months to process and sure enough, just about three months later, an envelope arrived from Thunder Bay. Unfortunately, it was a rejection since I had not included my original “long form” birth certificate. 1,342 miles.
As I wrote in “I don’t seem to exist” of June 10, there were certain documents still in the family home, which took until mid-May to get. One of those documents had the title “Certificate of Birth”. Made a copy for my files and sent the application back to T Bay. 2,013 miles.
This time it took about a week to be returned. It seems “Certificate of Birth” is not the same as “Birth Certificate”. 2,684 miles.
My son has been working on a family history and through his efforts, we were able to determine that apparently my father didn’t exist. I covered all this in “Whatever is left…” and how I found some information, not through the ancestry; government or newspaper sites, but by typing his name into Google. That didn’t give me all the information I needed for the application for the long form birth certificate, such as his place of birth. Because I was also able to find the names, birth dates and dates of death for my paternal grandparents, my son was able to contact the Government of Nova Scotia and get the information we both needed – he for the history and me for the application. I couldn’t find the information requested from the hospital as neither the hospital nor their records exist any longer. I wrote a letter explaining this, attached it to the application and mailed the whole package back to the Registrar-General’s office on August 9. 3,355 miles.
Friday October 4, the mail finally brought my new short form birth certificate legally identifying me as “female.” 4,026 miles.
The following Monday, I received yet another envelope from the Registrar-General. This one contained a certified copy of the long form birth certificate. Another 671 miles.
So, from my initial application until receipt of all documents at my address, paper of various kinds travelled a total of 4,697 miles. Total time, including finding information was just over 10 months.
A friend who has seen what I’ve gone through asked a very good question: If I’ve had this much trouble finding information on my father, what about people who were adopted and need the long form birth certificate? Are they to be denied one because they have no idea who their birth parents were?
Cat.
Catseyeview 
Glad to see you back in action! Nothing worse for a Blogger than to lose connection to their work. With regard to this topic, I must say congratulations on finally coming to the end of this mind boggling journey for something that should, under normal circumstances, be considered normal. But as I’ve often said, ‘that’s our government.’ In all fairness though, I have to say that it didn’t help matters that your elusive father’s birth information was so difficult to find and not where you expected it to be which ended up causing a lot of lost time and tons of aggravation in the process, but I’m so glad it has all come together. I just find the ‘mileage’ incredible when you really think about the distance that documents actually traveled. And you know, if you had to have traveled all those miles yourself could you imagine the cost? And of course there is no reimbursement for any of it. Now I shall say,’Well done!’
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