Birth Certificates
All identification in all countries comes back to the original registration of birth. So the first thing an identity changer needs to do is acquire the birth certificate of the original holder of the identity being assumed. To do this, you will need to know where and when the person was born and, ideally, the parents' names and the mother's maiden name.
Other than the sources already mentioned, one place to get this information is from birth notices in the newspapers. You will find that many births are never announced in the papers. This is because many of us are bastards, in more ways than one, and newspaper editors are very tactful about such matters. In fact, the birth may not be announced if the parents had a big society wedding five or six months prior to the birth. In these cases hospital records and church baptismal records may come in handy.
Once you have the proper information, you need to then request a copy of the birth certificate. You needn't be worried about arousing suspicion. Lots of people do not have either their original birth certificate or a copy. They get lost, their parents never gave it to them, they get destroyed in fires or floods, etc. In fact, the lack of an original birth certificate is so common that the Passport Office provides information on how to go about requesting a certified copy. Contact your nearest Passport Office to get this information.
There will usually be a small fee for the duplicate birth certificate. When requesting one, you should use a letterhead run off in the name of the person whose ID you are after. You should use money orders for all payments required, and conduct your communications through a mail drop. That will make it harder for anyone looking for you to trace you, should something unexpected come up.
If you counter resistance to your request, there are ways of getting around it. I know of one stuffy county clerk who would not provide a birth certificate to a friend of mine who wanted to acquire a specific identity. My friend simply found a lawyer who had just hung out his shingle in the town where the deceased was born. My friend told the attorney that he was looking for a missing heir and needed to see the potential heir's birth certificate.
The lawyer didn't even raise an eyebrow. He said that his fee would be fifty dollars, payable in advance. My friend laid out a U.S. Grant, the lawyer deposited it in his vest pocket, then told my friend to make himself comfortable in the waiting room. The attorney then headed across town to the courthouse. A half hour later my friend had not only a certified copy of the birth certificate he wanted, but copies of both the individual's parents' birth certificates, too.
Once you have the birth certificate, getting the rest of the documents you need is a piece of cake. We'll take a look at a few of the more important pieces of ID you will want to acquire.
Social Security Number
One of the trickier pieces of ID to get will be a new Social Security number. As we stated before, it is extremely inadvisable to use the number that came with your new identity because you may cause all sorts of bells and whistles to go off at the Social Security Administration. And it is even more important not to use the number you had in your former identity, again because the inconsistency between names and numbers is going to catch up with you. The SSA may not say anything as long as you keep paying into the system, but when your turn comes to be on the receiving end, look out.
The tricky part about getting a Social Security number is making up a clever ruse to satisfy a snoopy clerk who wants to know why you're applying so late in life. First of all, it's none of their business. No one says you have to tell them anything. Their job is to take names and issue numbers. And most clerks will do just that. They don't get paid a fortune to fill out those forms, so chances are they aren't too sophisticated and probably don't give a damn. But if you don't want to draw any unnecessary attention to yourself, it could be handy to have a ruse at the ready.
There are a lot of logical reasons for a person not to get a Social Security number until late in life. A person just released from an institution like a prison or a mental hospital may never have had a card. Someone who's been a "perpetual student" spending years accumulating degrees may not have one. Probably the best ruse is that you've been living abroad since your parents moved to Canada when you were a teenager. Any of these ruses should be enough to bore the clerk into issuing the number.
Drivers License
Once you have your birth certificate you can run down to the Department of Motor Vehicles and land a drivers license. The respect given to a drivers license as positive identification is astonishing, even comforting, though by no means is it justified by the evidence. The drivers license is almost universally demanded when cashing checks, which is why check artists always have a license at the ready. I've known people who offered their passports with recent photos as proof of their identification and had them turned down in favor of the drivers license. And passports contain more thorough information and are more expensive and harder to obtain than a drivers license.
There is some justification for the affinity for drivers licenses. In most states a
