What do all people born in Bahrain during the 20th Century until the mid-1960’s have in common?
00/00
They all have the same birthday!
You can also have a look at today’s lists of CPR numbers for the inflation charity, and see that people born from 1900 (mashalla mashalla) till 1965 will have double zeroes after the year of birth.
I beleive the reasons behind this is that many people were actually born at home rather than maternity hospitals like Al-Na’im Hospital (which of my mother was named after) and that the government simply did not record them and when they actually did start recording birthdates for passports many people gave false or approximate dates of birth.
Last August, a fellow blogger wrote about a conversation she had with a 60-year old Bahraini woman about her birthday and on that post I (anonymously) added a comment and being the lazy person I am, I’ll just copy-paste it:
Today I saw my late father’s passport for the very first time, and the same question sprung up when was his birthday, but as many people born before the sixties and seventies of the last century there was no date of birth and his CPR number started 4400 with the zeroes acknowledging the lack of a birth date.
My mother, although nearly ten years younger than my father, has no birth date and even the year of her birth is still debatable having several government documents with different birth dates ranging from 1952 to 1954 (with 1954 being her right age apparently).
When I asked her about her birthday she told me that her mother (my grandmother) said that she was born during the hot summer months (presumely July-August) and that Gamal Abdulnasser was in power.
After reading horoscope books, she defined herself as a Cancer thus says that she was born on July not August! lol
I intended to put a picture of my father’s last passport but after nagging my mother to open the تجوري (safe) to get the passports I found something even more interesting… his really old passports! (Notice that there is no date of birth, just the year)
Anyways I think I should end this because I feel that I’m going nowhere with this post,plus I need to rest my F1 filled head on a pillow…
aha, the truth is out! how many other comments have you left on people’s blogs as ‘anonymous’?!
this is a nice post…i love family history. and documents like that can tell us a lot about lives that were so different to ours, even though quite recent.
7adda cool! Retro passport!
@bint battuta: lol, to be quite honest, just yours! and the reason was whenever I wanted to post a reply (from work) Blogger doesn’t let me for some reson so I decided to try posting anonymously and when that worked, I tried to edit my reply and add my name but once again it didn’t let me!
As about the passport, I was looking for his last passport (which I still haven’t found) and when my mother gave me the old ones my eyes sparkled and flipping through the pages and seeing the places he visited, I can imagine him telling us stories from his travels
@ RedBelt: I have two other passports but they looked like the one posted above except that the photo is a bit older with him with a moustache and beard.
WOW! So impressed with the passport! Blast from the past type thing. Very interesting. Thanks for the post.