Where to look, in order
Work down this list and stop when you have a time you trust.
The full birth record
The civil registration of your birth comes first, and the version matters. Many registries issue a short certificate with little more than name, date and place, and a full one that copies the whole register entry; if a time was recorded, it is on the full version. The country notes below say what that copy is called and whether the time is usually on it.
Hospital and midwife records
Maternity units and midwives kept their own notes of each delivery, and those notes can include the time. Where they survive, they fill the gap a register leaves. Whether they still exist, and who may ask for them, depends on the country and on how long ago you were born, so ask the hospital, or whoever now holds its old records, what is left.
Family papers
Look through what your family kept: a baby book, a birth announcement cut from a local paper, cards and letters sent in the first weeks, a parent's diary, notes on the back of an early photograph. A time written down within days of the birth, by someone who was there, is worth more than one recalled much later.
Asking your parents and relatives
If no paper turns up, ask the people who were there, and ask about the day rather than the number. A remembered "half past four" can drift over the decades. A memory tied to an event is often more trustworthy, because the event can be checked. Questions that tend to bring such anchors back:
- Was it light or dark outside? Before or after breakfast, lunch or the evening meal?
- Had the nurses or midwives just changed shift?
- What was on the radio or the television?
- Were the other children at school, or had someone gone to fetch them?
- Who was telephoned first with the news, and were they already in bed?
Ask more than one person, separately, and compare what they say. If your mother remembers the night staff arriving and your father remembers a late news bulletin, the two anchors together can narrow the window a long way.
Church registers
Baptism registers occasionally note the hour of birth next to the date. If you were baptised, the parish, or the archive that now holds its registers, is worth asking.
Country notes: which record shows the time
Registration rules differ between countries and have changed over time. These notes describe them as they stand today; an older record followed the rules of its day, so read them as a guide to what to ask for, not a promise of what is on the page.
England and Wales. The register records a time only when more than one living child is born at the same confinement. Twins and triplets have one on the full certificate; for a single birth there is none, and the search moves on to the other sources above.
Scotland. Every birth entry records the time of birth. Ask for the full extract, also called the full certificate, which reproduces the whole register entry; the abbreviated certificate shows only the name, date and place of birth.
Northern Ireland. The rule matches England and Wales: the time is entered only for twins and other multiple births.
Ireland. Current civil registration law lists the time of birth among the details entered in the register of births. The short certificate gives only name, sex, date of birth and registration area, so ask for the full, long-form certificate, which is a certified copy of the register entry. Older entries, made under earlier rules, may not include the time.
United States. Birth registration belongs to each state, so names and layouts vary, but the national standard certificate recommended to the states has a box for the time of birth. Ask for the long-form certificate, a copy of the original record. A short-form certificate or abstract typically gives only the name, sex, date and place of birth and the parents' names.
Germany. Under current law the birth certificate itself, the Geburtsurkunde, states the place, day, hour and minute of birth. Ask the register office (Standesamt) where the birth was registered.
France. The birth record (acte de naissance) states the day, hour and place of birth and is drawn up in the town where the birth happened. The full copy (copie intégrale) reproduces the whole record, and even the short extract without the parents' details includes the hour.
Spain. The civil registry entry records the place, date and hour of birth. The registry issues an extract unless you ask otherwise, so request the literal certificate (certificación literal), which reproduces the entire entry.
Italy. The birth record (atto di nascita) states the hour of birth. The civil status office of the comune issues a summary extract by default; the full copy (estratto per copia integrale), an exact transcription of the record, is issued when you ask for it expressly.
For other countries the same rule of thumb holds: ask for the fullest copy of the register entry the registry issues, and read it line by line.
Reading the time you find
A time on a record is the local clock time of that date and place, summer time included when it was in force. Enter it exactly as written. Do not take an hour off for summer time yourself: our chart converts local times with the historical time-zone and daylight-saving rules for the place and date, and adjusting by hand would count the change twice. Our guide to why birth charts differ from site to site explains how programs handle clock changes.
Round numbers deserve a little suspicion. A time on the hour or the half-hour may be exact, but it may also have been rounded by someone writing quickly, so treat it as approximate unless something else confirms it. A 12:00 deserves a second look for another reason: noon is also what many chart programs, ours included, use when no time is known, so make sure yours came from a record and not from an old chart someone cast without one.
Then there is the question of what the time marks. Astrologers generally use the moment of the first breath. That is a convention rather than a settled question, and a register or a hospital note rarely says whether its time marks the first breath, the delivery or the moment someone looked at the clock afterwards. When the Ascendant sits right at the edge of a sign, keep this small uncertainty in mind.
How exact the time needs to be
The Ascendant, the degree rising on the eastern horizon, goes once round the whole zodiac in a day: 360 degrees in 24 hours, which is about one degree every four minutes on average. A sign spans thirty degrees, so twelve signs in a day means the rising sign changes about every two hours on average, and the Midheaven and the house cusps turn with it.
The average hides a great deal: signs rise at very different speeds, depending on the latitude. Our computed figures for three cities:
| Birthplace | Quickest rising sign | Slowest rising sign | Midheaven to Ascendant |
|---|---|---|---|
| London (51.5° N) | Aries, 52 min | Virgo, 2 h 51 min | 54° to 126° |
| New York (40.7° N) | Aries, 1 h 11 min | Leo, 2 h 33 min | 65° to 115° |
| Sydney (33.9° S) | Libra, 1 h 20 min | Taurus, 2 h 25 min | 70° to 110° |
In London, Aries rises in 52 minutes, so a quarter of an hour there covers more than a quarter of the sign. Virgo takes 2 h 51 min, and the same quarter of an hour covers less than a tenth of it. Astrologers call the quick signs signs of short ascension and the slow ones signs of long ascension; in the southern hemisphere the two groups swap, which is why Sydney's quickest sign is Libra rather than Aries. The last column shows that the Midheaven and the Ascendant are not a fixed 90 degrees apart either; the gap changes through the day, one reason a chart's houses come in unequal sizes, as our guides to the Midheaven and the four angles and the twelve houses explain.
The Moon is far less sensitive. It moves about half a degree an hour, 13.2 degrees a day on average, so an hour's error shifts it by half a degree, which changes nothing unless it was about to change sign or complete an exact aspect. At that pace it crosses a thirty-degree sign in a little over two days, and only on the day it changes sign does the time decide your Moon sign. You can check yours in the Moon sign calculator.
So a time within a quarter of an hour usually settles the rising sign, unless the Ascendant falls near the edge of a sign. Say you were born in London and your chart shows 14° Virgo rising. Virgo takes nearly three hours to rise there, so a quarter of an hour either way moves the Ascendant by less than three degrees, and it stays in Virgo. If the chart shows 28° Aries rising instead, two degrees from the edge of a sign that rises in under an hour, a few minutes could put you in Taurus, and pinning the time down is worth the effort.
If nothing turns up
Use what you have. A window is more useful than it sounds: "some time in the morning" or "after midnight but before the milk was delivered" already rules out most of the day. Enter the earliest and the latest time in your window in our rising sign calculator. If both give the same rising sign, you know it, even without the minute. If they differ, you know which signs are in the running, and reading their pages side by side often makes one of them sound familiar.
Some astrologers offer rectification: working backwards from the timing of events in a person's life to the birth time that fits them best. It is interpretation rather than a record, and two astrologers can arrive at different times, so treat the result as an estimate and keep looking for paper.
If there is no time at all, our free chart still works. It casts the chart for noon local time, leaves out the houses and the Ascendant, and names both possible signs if the Sun or the Moon changed sign that day. Apart from that, the planets in their signs, which make up most of what a chart describes, almost always hold for the whole day.