I don’t have very many birth certificates in my genealogy archives. Birth records in White County are rather sparse for the early years (1875 – 1900) and confidential for the later years (i.e., less than 75 years old); in between, I’ve collected a few.

I do have a surprising number of originals: certified copies from various ancestors, passed down to me.

In 2010, I scanned all my genealogy documents; I keep them in my Dropbox folder, so they’re always accessible. (Handy thing, Dropbox; so much so that I almost feel guilty for not giving them any money.)

Now I am creating source records for them all, in Reunion 9; and I’ve run into an interesting question. I have four different kinds of birth certificates:

• Form #1, which is short & has no particular official markings on it.
• Form #2, which is headlined White County Board of Health & is a rather detailed government form.
• An entry from the birth register, one of the big books in the County Clerk’s archives. (And getting one of those onto the copy machine was quite a challenge, I can tell you.)
• Various originals, generally produced decades after the birth in question.

These are all local records: issued by the county, not by the state. So, in theory, they should all use the local-records source template. Or should I have a different source template for the originals?

For now, they’re all filed under local records. But that might change.