44 Hattie Plum Williams 
That the law was not being observed is suggested by an amend- 
ment passed in 1875 requiring the assessors to take oath as to 
the correctness of their returns and providing a certain sum per 
capita for the names registered.» The effort to secure vital 
statistics was finally given up in 1885 when the statute was re- 
pealed by an act providing for a state census to be taken that 
year. For twenty years this law for the registration of vital 
statistics was on the statute books; but diligent inquiry fails to 
reveal any results which ever came from it, except a deep regret 
that it was not enforced. 
In 1889 the city of Lincoln passed an ordinance requiring the 
registration of births and deaths, and since September of that year 
fairly complete death certificates have been returned because 
permits were necessary to secure burial in the city cemeteries. 
Moreover, the town was becoming large enough that the coroner 
felt called to insist upon this formality as a means of detecting 
crime. <A few birth certificates are found for that year but the 
health officer failed to enforce the law and for ten years there- 
after not a single birth entry is made. In 1901, influenced by a 
general agitation over the country for registration, the health 
officer made a spasmodic attempt to enforce the ordinance but 
only those physicians obeyed who believed in the desirability and 
necessity of such records.* The most faithful person to report 
was a woman doctor who handled many of the lying-in cases in 
the Russian German settlements, but almost fifty per cent. of these 
were treated by Russian German midwives who paid no attention 
to the ordinance and who were left unmolested. Besides being 
incomplete, the birth records up to 1912 are unusable for com- 
parative purposes unless the rural records are separated from the 
city records. To do this, a knowledge of the changes in the city 
enforcement would have provided a imine of historical and social data 
for present use. 
5 Complete Session Laws of Nebraska, II, 848. 
6 Laws of Nebraska, 1885, 97-108. 
7In 1903 Congress passed a resolution urging the states to enact suitable 
registration laws. Cf. Congressional Record, 57th Cong., 2d Sess., 
XXXVI, 585. 
8 Cf. below, 47, footnote 14. 
170 
