In need of a license

I follow a Facebook page titled "Taste of Texas" and the other day the post was about an improvised marriage license. The post included only the content of the license, reproduced below, but a reader supplied the information that the source was originally an 1897 volume of Harper's Magazine.

The longer story add the background that clerk in question, Henry Osborne,

"pastured his cows on the broad acres around, bringing them home at night, and letting them go to grass in the morning. He kept a bell on one of them to help him in finding them; but one morning, as he was letting them loose, he perceived that the clapper of the bell was lost out, and, being unable to find it, he made a substitute by making fast in the bell his office-key."

"Not till he reached his office did it occur to him that he should want the key, but now finding himself locked out, he betook himself to other matters, proposing to recover the key at night. About noon a rough-and-ready young Texan, in buckskin dress, came riding into town, inquired for the clerk, scared him up, and asked for a marriage-license."

The story goes on to narrate how Osborne tried to postpone preparing the license, but the cowboy was set on getting married that day, so together they set out to find the cow, and the key.

"But the more they looked the less they found, and finally had to give it up. A bright thought struck the Clerk of the County. 'I'll fix you out!' said he, and they proceeded to a store close by the office, and there the county scribe indited the following autograph:

"Republic of Texas:

To all who shall see this present, greeting:

Whereas I, the undersigned, Clerk of this County, having this morning unthoughtedly tied my office-key as a clapper Into my cow's bell and whereas the said cow has gone astray to parts unknown, bearing with her the said key, and therefore the said key is rum inventus est—that is, can't be had:

And whereas one Abner Barnes has made application to me for a marriage-license, and the said Abner persists that he can not wait until the cow comes back with the key, but is compelled, by the violence of his feelings and the arrangements already made, to get married:

Therefore these presents are to command any person legally authorized to celebrate the rites of matrimony to join the said Abner Barnes to Rebecca Downs; and for so doing this shall be your sufficient authority.

Given under my hand and private seal, on the doorstep of my office—tho seal of the office being locked up, and my cow having gone away with the key—this fourth day of October, A.D. 1838."

The story is amusing enough on its own, but Barb and I once found ourselves in a somewhat similar situation. We desperately needed a birth certificate for our son, Rob - on a Sunday afternoon.

It seems we were scheduled to fly to Mexico on that very afternoon, and from there we were going on a couple of days later to Guatemala to visit friends of ours living there at the time. On Saturday night it occurred to us that we might need some kind of documentation, and according to the information at hand Birth Certificates would be sufficient.

Mind you, this was a much kinder, more genteel time for air travel. We found one for Barb, one for me, one for Julie, our daughter and... none for Rob.  In a panic, Barb suggested that we get a notarized certificate from Esther Stewart, the church secretary.

We wrote up a very official-looking document that avowed that Rob was our son, and that he had indeed been born, and that this fore-mentioned birth took place in the US of A on the specified date. There was space for the Notary to affirm that all this was true, and with a great flourish, we signed the document, and Esther signed the document, and impressed her very official-looking seal over it all!

Getting into Mexico was not an issue - you really didn't even need a birth certificate at that time. It was Guatemala that concerned us, so early Monday morning we hied ourselves to the Guatemalan Consulate in Mexico City (where we learned how Latin Americans queue up for an official line - by shoving themselves to the front) and we presented our son and our document to an official and requested a more "official" document to get us in and out of Guatemala.

The clerk puzzled over our letter for a while, then took it to a neighboring clerk, who also puzzled over it and discussed its merits in rapid Spanish. No doubt they were discussing the officialness of such a document, and after reaching agreement that they had never encountered such a fine and impressive document, the first clerk came back, rubber stamp it, scribbled something we could not read on the paper and handed it back to us without a word.

My guess, from this perspective, is that what he wrote probably said, "Let these ignorant gringos into the country, even though they have no idea what a real birth certificate is." Even so, like Mr Osborne's marriage certificate above, our homemade "Birth Certificate" did the job.