Here is one of my favorite records, a birth registration in the County of Cumberland, Nova Scotia, 1865. (see Spence Pedigree Chart). I love the way they are laid out, where you can see all the babies in the area, and the fountain of info they provide.
Halfway down the page, you can see
#144 Samuel Matthew
Male
Date and place of Birth................................................ 4 April 1865 Halfway River.
Name, Occupation, and Dwelling Place of Father...... John Spence, Laborer, Halfway River.
Name, and Maiden Name of Mother.......................... Ann Almirah Pettygrew.
When and where married............................................ 1 Aug 1865, Halfway River.
Informant......................................................................John Spence.
Deputy Registrar......................................................... Geo. B. Fullerton.
It sounds just like those German birth certificates from Berlin, doesn't it?
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Our Uncle Sam is the first child of John and Almirah Spence. He is named for his 2 grandfathers, Samuel Spence and Matthew Pettigrew. It says that John and Almirah were married on 1 August 1865, after Sam's birth, but that's not true. They were actually married on the same day as Almirah's brother, Robert Pettigrew, married his wife Ann McAloney, and that is clearly 1 August 1864. You can see that Robert and Ann Pettigrew had their first child at the same time, since she's on the same page. She was named Deborah for their mutual grandmother, Deborah Spence Pettigrew. Why are there so many Spences and Pettigrews on the same page? That's what it was like when families all lived in the same community.
Curiously, Nova Scotia stopped requiring birth registration in 1877. What happened when you needed your birth certificate to enlist in the army or become a naturalized citizen? That's when it gets even more interesting. Here, Uncle Sam, whose birth is registered above, swears that he was in the house when his baby brother, Uncle Ains, was born. I'm pretty sure my 18-year-old son wouldn't want to be in the house while his mother was having a baby, and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want him there either. Maybe he meant it generally, like, that's where I was living at the time.
In this one, my great-grandmother Phoebe Esther Rushton Spence (Mrs. William M. Spence) swears that my grandmother Bessie Spence was born on 30 August 1893. She is her mother and knows the above to be correct. She swears this 50 years later, in 1943.
Funnily enough, on another birth certificate I saw, the mother has so many children that she swears on 2 different occasions that 2 different children were born in the same month, and they weren't twins. I think it was Aunt Jane. Need a shoe to fit all your children in?
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