And that’s with modern record keeping where there are all safeguards and things are eventually digitized. Imagine the days when it was only on paper at some hospital where the records room was damaged in a flood or it wasn’t digitized for half a century so no way to check the handwriting, or the person had a strong accent or some dirt or mold fuzzed the paper, etc ……

I am one of the millions of people in the US whose name was fudged by immigration officials at Ellis Island. We know the name they wrote down and we have the family claim of what it used to be, by Mon objective way to prove it or to know why. To make this anecdote crazier, my parents went back to the old country to find records. However this was the height of the Cold War and it was behind “the iron curtain” so they were prevented from leaving their hotel under threat f arrest as spies