About the California Birth Index
The California Birth Index is the state's official list of births registered between 1905 and 1995. It's not a collection of birth certificates — it's the name catalog, with enough detail to confirm a person, find relatives, or anchor a family tree.
This site makes that index searchable for free. No account, no subscription.
What you'll find on a record
- Full name and date of birth
- County of birth (not the specific city)
- Sex
- Mother's maiden name
- Father's last name
What you won't find
No birth certificates, street addresses, or times of birth. No records before 1905 — California didn't require statewide birth registration until then. No records after 1995, when the state stopped publishing the index publicly. For an actual certificate, you'll need to order one from California Vital Records.
How people use it
Most visitors are tracing a family line — confirming a grandparent's birthdate, finding siblings of a great-aunt, filling in a branch with mother's maiden names. Adoptees sometimes look here for biological siblings; depending on when the adoption was finalized, the index may list adoptive name, birth name, or both, so it's worth checking variants.
Family connections, automated
When you land on a record, we look for possible siblings by matching the parents' names across nearby birth years and surface them on the page. So a record for Beverly Kaaz (born 1959, mother's maiden name Keith) shows Robert Kaaz (born 1962, mother also Keith) as a likely sibling. These are suggestions to verify, not confirmations — but they save you a search.
If you can't find someone
The index isn't perfect. A few things to try when a record won't surface:
- Check spelling variants (Anne / Ann, McDonald / MacDonald)
- Search by the mother's maiden name if you have it
- Use parents' names if you don't know the firstname
- Contact the County Clerk where the birth happened — county records sometimes predate the state index
- Check local newspaper birth announcements for the year and town
Cross-referencing with death records
Where we find a likely match in the California Death Index, the record page links across automatically. That's how you confirm whether the person is still living, and how you find the death year for genealogical date ranges.
