reporting births 10 years later?

[warriorrabbit]

I thought these two were going to be twins, but then they are actually reporting births from years earlier, one a decade earlier!
Weird.

1888
Salvatore and Nicolo #208 and #209
https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903 ... cc=1946858

[cedrone]

They are not twins, one born 1878,, the other 1874, as written on the acts, the births are written later by the order of the Court of Patti.
It's evident that at the time of births the parents omitted to declare the births ("or less probably) there was a mistake at the comune and were not registered.

[warriorrabbit]

I could have been more clear, I guess, about what I was surprised by. It was very late, I was tired.

I had anticipated they were twins due to consecutive numbers (I just had a family with 2 sets of twins), but then as I noted they were being reported years later, one as much as a decade later. In fact, not only were they not twins, they weren't even from the same family.

After posting this last night, I later saw that in this particular year, in this town, there are actually at least half a dozen births (just from the names I'm looking at) being reported years (20 years even!) after the fact.

I think you are right. Having found all these other records where people were reporting the birth of their grown 20+ kids, there must have been a problem. Maybe a flood or fire or mouse or something destroyed the records. (I don't think it's likely that all these people forgot to record the births at the time.)

At least one record was clearly reported for a marriage, so they probably found during the paperwork process that records were missing.

[Primo Mattino]

My impression is that the registration of births became an indifferent thing in the south after the unification of Italy. Until 1865 there was very accurate registration in the Kingdom of Naples (at least in the aerea where I am doing something). If the registration was done about three days later than the birth, an explanation was requested as to why so late. If no declaration was made at all, a notarial deed with 6 witnesses had to be drawn up in the event of a marriage or such.
After 1865 in many cases hardly anything was checked, again that is my impression. Even now I regularly have spoken to old people who say with a laugh that they have declared their children years after birth or even all their children at once. I myself have an uncle who always celebrated his birthday on the wrong day and thought hij was 4 years younger until he was 88 years old, when I found his actual date of birth in the baptismal registers.