The department announced two months ago that it was in the process of updating personal profiles of residents especially some of those from Curacao and Aruba residing on the island, but whose profiles were incomplete with respect to a missing birth certificate.
Four staff members travelled to Aruba and Curacao where they were able to retrieve the missing data of the majority. Leona Romeo-Marlin, Head of the Sint Maarten Civil Registry Department, was very pleased with the cooperation she and her staff had received from the Census Departments of Aruba and Curacao.
Leona-Marlin explained by having the necessary birth certificates on file with the personal profiles, the parental information is complete and when a person is researching their family tree the information is readily available. The information is also valuable in the case of death, because the parent's information should be placed on the death certificate.
The updating of the database is also part of the plans of approach for the Civil Registry Office.
"The work in both Aruba and Curacao was very tedious and tiresome, but we prevailed and were able to retrieve the majority of birth certificates. Those that were not found we will send a letter to those specific individuals asking them to take the responsibility to bring it in to the office.
"The next group of persons will be minors without parental information. We have already published the names and will now run another query to see who complied and then send out letters to the parents.
"The last group are those born outside the former Netherlands Antilles and whose parent's information are missing. To prevent this from reoccurring, legal advice is being sought to make it mandatory for all persons registering with the Office of Civil Registry to bring a birth certificate," Head of the Civil Registry Office Leona Romeo-Marlin told the Department of Communication on Thursday.
