Well said. My mom was born in a cabin in South Dakota in 1924. The country doc filed the birth certificate a few days later and recorded the wrong birth date. There was no double checking the facts - it was just the way things were done. The doc just went from memory. It was never corrected - it's just not that important to my mom. I'm sure it was the same with Ada Jones' death certificate. It was filled out with the best knowledge of the available witnesses. If her husband even received a copy, he may not have bothered to read it in his time of grief. And if he did catch the mistake, would he really bother contacting the state of N.C. to get it corrected? Their would have been nothing to gain for the trouble. As far as getting all the proper paperwork together, who's to say that the rails weren't greased (no pun intended) to get a famous singer's body back to her family for burial. It was, after all, 1922, not 2008. We know when & where Ada was born and died. We know where she's buried. We know her true age. Is it really necessary to legally change a death certificate of someone who's been gone nigh on 90 years? Shall we next demand a correction from the NY Times for getting her age wrong in the obituary? Personally, I think these quirky paperwork glitches add a bit of color to the history and are a testament of the times in which she lived. Loran On Apr 13, 2008, at 9:14 AM, Thomas Edison wrote: > <snip> The problem with all of us we go at research with 21st > century thought, put yourself in a 19th and early 20th century > mindset when you do research and come to conclusions, makes things > much eiser to understand.