Why?
If you’re in the US, you should know this because if you want to apply for a passport, you’ll be required to provide information about your parents such as birth dates and places. If you’re divorced, you will have to provide the same info along with marriage and divorce date, even if it was decades ago. So if you have access to that info, make sure you record it somewhere safe for Future use.
If you’re not in the US, you should know because this information can be difficult for people to get if they never knew one or both parents, or have a bad/non-relationship with them. Or if they had a contentious divorce or an abusive partner. Which is another reason why just leaving the country can be difficult for people who are already marginalized.
All this info can probably be obtained through a country clerk / registrar depending on what you need to know.
what county was your mother or father born in? just 1 out of 3143.
hope your parents aren’t dead and you can’t ask them.
good luck!
/s
point is, this information used to be used as a way to align an identity to an individual, however with the expansion of digital identity information making its way on the internet the mechanism is broken.
I different method could and should be used.
If I live in new york, but I know that my parents were born somewhere on the west coast, would this still apply? Can I contact my county clerk for the info?