Rectification: Deducing Your Birth Time
www.jodieforrestastrology.com. Email: jodietighe@gmail.com. (Forrest is my professional last name; my legal last name is Tighe, if you’re wondering why I have two.)
Here's the scoop about rectifying (deducing) a birth time:
First, please exhaust all the possibilities for finding your birth time. My website has a page about finding your birth certificate: https://birthcert.jodieforrestastrology.com/. Do try to find it, because mothers have been known to insist, "It was 7:10 in the evening," when your birth certificate says you weighed 7 pounds and 10 ounces, and the birth time recorded on the certificate is totally different. If you were born in or after about 1968 in the U.S., the time should be on your birth certificate, and it's often there even if you were born earlier than 1968. The page on my website includes places you can look for certificates for births outside the U.S.
If you can’t find your birth certificate, or if the time isn’t listed on it, the next step is to narrow down the possible time frame (the earliest and latest hours between which you have good reason to think you were born) as much as you can. Please do all you can to narrow the time frame as long as you have some reasonably concrete evidence to do so, such as a blurry birth certificate, more than one person's memories, or your mother's specific memory with a good reason to have retained that recollection. ("I'd just looked at the hospital clock, and it said 10:00 a.m. on the dot," for example, or, "I'd just heard the bell tower ring noon," etc.).
If I don't have a wide enough time frame, you risk my not arriving at the right birth time. That's because the patterns I'd be looking for might not exist within an inaccurate time frame.
I usually don’t do rectifications if the time frame is wider than six hours. There are some exceptions, so please inquire whether rectification might still be possible in your case.
Suggestions for finding your birth time or narrowing its time frame:
* Look for baby books, journals, family Bibles or the equivalent. Ask your older relatives where your parents might have written down your birth time and whom they might have told about it.
* Ask all your older relatives—not just your parents—or even ask any longtime family friends for any recollection of what they were doing when they heard you’d been born.
For example:
* You might find that an older brother remembers that you hadn’t been born when he left for school, but at lunch time, the school told him that he had a new baby sister or brother (you!). That would narrow down the time frame, starting from whenever your brother left for school, to whenever lunch was over.
* One of your relatives may be passionate about her hobby of genealogy, and she just might have your birth time in her files.
* Perhaps your aunt or uncle or another relative or a family friend was staying with your siblings while your mother was giving birth. The relative or friend might remember when he/she was informed that you had just been born.
* Contact the hospital, the physician, the midwife, or the adoption agency when relevant. It’s easier to get adoption information than it used to be. Some of my clients have had good luck when they very politely explained that all they wanted to know was their time of birth.
* Call the relevant birth-certificate-granting entity where you were born. Sometimes the birth time is in the State records, or even in the Armed Services records if your parent was on active duty, even if the time isn’t on the birth certificate itself.
If you have no luck finding your birth time, you’re a candidate for rectification. I enjoy doing them. But there's also no guarantee I'll be accurate to the minute. The narrower the possible time frame, the better chance I have of finding your accurate birth time.
Your Event List: The content of your list will be kept confidential.
To do a rectification, I start by looking very closely at several possible charts, equally spaced within the time frame of your birth, and seeing how accurately they would have reflected the astrological placements of the planets on extremely important dates in your life. To begin this process, I need a list of at least two dozen important events from over the course of your whole life, and the more events, the better. Please state the events' dates just as precisely as possible: place, month, day, time and year if you possibly can. If not, then:
* season and year is better than just the year
* month and year is better than just season and year
* early or late in a month is better than just that month as a whole.
* early or late in a week is better than just that week as a whole
Also, if you remember more events or details for your list after you’ve given it to me, please let me know about them, because they could help me refine the rectification.
Are you having a hard time coming up with your list? Maybe your spouse, aunt/uncle, sister/brother, co-worker, neighbor or a family friend has an excellent memory for dates. Maybe you kept your appointment books or your personal journals, or maybe your spouse or sibling or child did. Maybe some business, governmental, medical or educational agency involved in an event has a record of it.
As for what sort of events are important, I try not to "lead the witness" too much (with some exceptions), because what's important to you can give me some clues about your birth chart. With that in mind, any of the following might or might not be important TO YOU:
family members’ and significant others’ birth data
entering or leaving school or work,
beginnings and endings of significant relationships (friendships or love affairs),
earning or losing a lot of money,
work changes, including learning new work skills,
highly creative times,
outstanding personal achievement,
births and/or deaths of significant others or family members or beloved pets,
earning educational degrees or professional licenses,
changing religions,
meeting mentors or important teachers,
entering psychotherapy,
joining or leaving significant groups, etc.
important travel
serious illnesses
accidents or other trauma
anything unusual
Please don't try to find an event in every single one of those categories; just list events that were significant to you.
Exceptions to my not “leading the witness”: please DO include:
1. your parents', sibs', spouses', very best friends’, and children's birth or death dates, with places and times if possible, or just the birth dates if you know them.
2. any event that's both unusual and significant to you personally--for example, unexpectedly winning a lottery, accidents, injuries, illnesses or assaults, surviving a natural disaster or a fire or a collapsed building, arrests, surgeries, struck by lightning, met your favorite musician, actor or writer, had a fabulous vacation, had a feeling not to take a plane that crashed, a wonderful stray animal adopted you, you had a revelation in psychotherapy that changed your life, you escaped from a country that was in a political crisis, you had a powerful spiritual or metaphysical experience, you had a short story accepted for publication, etc.
3. whenever you moved/relocated to a different physical address (where you sleep, rather than something like moving your office). Also, please tell me if a move was a particularly significant one, and why.
It's also helpful, but optional, to send me several photos of you that were taken at different ages. A digital format is best and safest, but any hard copy you send will be treated with care and returned to you once I’ve finished the rectification.
Fees: if you know the time frame within:
one hour, $200.00
two hours, $250.00
three hours, $300.00
four hours, $350.00
five hours, $400.00
six hours, $450.00
Payable in advance, please, by any of these methods:
Ven*Mo, @Jodie-Tighe
Paypal, mouse777@me.com
Check or money order in USD sent to: Jodie Forrest (or Tighe), PO Box 1311, Ramona, CA 92065
All major credit cards
Thank you. I look forward to working with you.
Sincerely,
Jodie Forrest
