My birth certificate has an error - my mother's birth country!?

Question

I've only recently acquired my BC, since my mother has always kept it in her paperwork. When I was looking at it yesterday, I noticed there is an error - my mother's birth country.

It states that my mother was born in Belgium. She has Belgian nationality, because she was born in the Belgian Congo, which at the time was under Belgian rule, although is effectively part of Africa. She moved to Belgium before she was 5, so all records after this would have been in Belgium.

Can I update my BC to show the right information? Or is it a lost cause? I'm just thinking about the confusion of future generations if they are searching for my mother's birth in Belgium.

What would you advise?

Answer 1

Leave it alone.  That is what it was at the time.  Even though it may have technically been located in Africa, it was under Belgian rule.  Countries and borders and who is in control of whom change throughout history.  Every time that happens, people cannot go around changing all their ancestors birth records to fit the current world map.  Here are some more recent examples:

Czechoslovakia: Peacefully split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993.

Siam: Changed its name to Thailand in 1939.

Sikkim: Now part of far northern India, Sikkim was an independent monarchy from the 17th century until 1975.

Tanganyika and Zanzibar: These two African countries united in 1964 to form Tanzania.

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR): Broke into fifteen new countries in 1991: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldovia, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.

Yugoslavia: The original Yugoslavia divided up into Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro, and Slovenia in the early 1990s.

As you can see, the better approach would be to understand the differences in world geography for the time period in which one is researching their ancestors, rather than to change the records to reflect the current maps.  Leave notes to this effect in your research for your future ancestors.