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Show LEGALLY UNBORN. An instance of the value of a correct registration of the births of children of foreign parents, should these children ever find their way back to the mother country, occurred to-day in the Bureau of Vital Statistics Dr. Nagle received a letter from Mrs. Pauline Rothschild, of No. ?? Towner Strasse Leipzig, containing the request that a copy of the record of her two children's birth in New York City be sent to her without delay. She writes that not only the happiness, but the very existence, of the family depended on the possibility of obtaining these documents. The daughter, now a girl of twenty-two years, had found an admirer and desired to marry but, to the amazement of the lovers, the German Government flatly refused to allow the ceremony to be performed until the fact that the bride had been born had been officially attested and property vouched for by the registrar of this city. The production of the girl in evidence, with the corroborative testimony of her mother, [unreadable] the methodical Leipzig officers in the absence of the requisite papers, had the bride was left in the uncomfortable position of being legally unborn to the discomfiture of her nonplused suitor. About this time a further complication occurred. Julius Rothschild, the son, just twenty years old, was summoned to appear at the sessions for examination, and enrollment in the imperial army. In vain he protested that he was an American citizen, born in the United States. His papers were demanded in proof, and failing to produce them he was ordered to appear at the regimental headquarters. The despair of the mother may be imagined. Julius was her only son and her only support. Enrollment in the army, aside from the hazard of war, would take him from his employment for three full years and leave her desolate. She applied to the American Consul at Leipzig in vain. The proofs that her statements were true were demanded of her. In her perplexity the widow hit upon the expedient of writing to the authorities in New York, and her letter reached Dr. Nagle to-day addressed to the "Registrater of New York." Dr. Nagle took immediate steps to help Mrs. Rothschild out of her trouble by having the records searched, and within two or three weeks the family will be ones more made happy, and the German bridegrooms will be relieved from a most perplexing dilemma. The present case is one out of a hundred that comes under the notice of Dr. Nagle in the course of the year. The German laws on the subject of registration of vital statistics are uncommonly stringent, and are rigidly enforced to insure a perfect census of the population. The knowledge of this ?? is widely diffused among the German citizens of this city, and has caused the birth records of that race to be far more perfect than that of any other class of ?? of New York.-N. Y. Evening Post. |