How to Find Your Birth Time in Delaware

You need the time because the rising sign changes roughly every two hours and the whole house structure of a chart is built from it. An hour of error moves your rising sign by about half a sign. Four hours of error and almost nothing in the chart is in the right place. The date and year alone give you a Sun sign and very little else.

The short version

1. Check what you already have. Pull out whatever birth certificate is in the house and look for a line reading "Hour", "Time of Birth" or "Time". If it is there, you are done.
2. If it is not there, you are holding the abstract. Order the certified copy of the original record from the Delaware Division of Public Health, Office of Vital Statistics.
3. When you fill in the request, write that you need the copy that shows the hour of birth. Some offices issue the abstract by default.
4. Look up the current address and fee for Delaware here. Fees and processing times change, so check rather than trust a figure on any blog, including this one.
5. When it arrives, read the hour exactly as written. Do not adjust it for daylight saving yourself. Here is why that matters.

Which copy actually shows the hour

Nearly every state issues a birth certificate in two forms, and they are not interchangeable for this purpose.

What Delaware clocks were doing

Delaware is on Eastern time. The hour written on the certificate is local Eastern time as the clock read in the room, which is what a chart needs.

The rule that trips up almost everybody is daylight saving. The hour on your certificate is the hour the clock on the wall said. If you were born during daylight saving, that clock was running an hour ahead of standard time, and a chart has to subtract that hour before it calculates anything. Good software does this for you from the date and place. The problem is that the current daylight saving rule only dates from 2007, and software that applies today's rule to a birth before then puts the chart an hour out. The full history of American clock rules is here, and it is messier than you would believe.

Which town to enter, not which town you are from

A chart is cast for the place the birth happened, which means the town the hospital is in. In Delaware most births happen in or near Wilmington, Dover and Newark, and people are very often born in one of those and raised somewhere else entirely. If your family lived in a small town, there is a good chance you were actually born in the nearest city with a maternity unit.

The certificate settles it. The certified copy names the hospital or the address, so use that, not the address your parents lived at. Getting this wrong by fifty or a hundred miles usually will not change your rising sign, but it shifts the house cusps enough to move a planet from one house into the next, and that does change the reading.

If the hour is not on the record

It happens, and more often for births before about 1950. Not every hospital recorded the hour, and not every state required it. If the certified copy comes back without a time, you have not done anything wrong and ordering it again will not help.

For births before roughly the First World War there may be no state record at all. Most states only began registering every birth statewide somewhere between about 1880 and 1920, and the exact year varies from state to state. Published lists of those years disagree with each other, so it is worth asking the Delaware Division of Public Health, Office of Vital Statistics directly rather than trusting a figure online. Where no original record exists, states issue what is usually called a delayed certificate, built from other evidence, and those rarely carry an hour.

In rough order of how likely they are to work:

• Hospital records. The hospital where you were born may still hold the admission and delivery notes, which usually carry a time even when the certificate does not. Ask for your own medical records; you have a right to them.
• A baby book, a christening or naming record, or a newspaper birth announcement. Announcements in small-town papers often printed the hour.
• Family memory, written down. "Just before dinner" is not a time, but it is a two-hour window, and that is enough to narrow a chart considerably.
• Rectification. An astrologer works backwards from events you can date, such as a move, a marriage or a death, to find the birth time that fits them. It is skilled work and it is not guesswork, but it is an estimate, and anybody who tells you otherwise is overselling it.

Reading the certificate once you have it

Three things to check before you type it into anything.

1. Is it written on a twelve-hour or twenty-four-hour clock? "7:20" with no AM or PM is ambiguous and twelve hours of error is the worst possible kind. Look for "AM", "PM", or a figure above 12, which tells you it is a twenty-four-hour clock.
2. Is the hospital named? Enter the hospital's town, not your family's home town. They are often not the same place, and a hundred miles changes the houses.
3. Does the hour look suspiciously round? A time written as exactly 12:00 or 6:00 was sometimes a nurse rounding rather than reading a clock. It is still the best information you have, but it is worth knowing the margin is wider than a minute.