Which birth certificate details confirm Michelle Obama's birthplace and birth name?
Executive summary
The official long-form and short-form birth-certificate images released by the Obama White House record Michelle Obama’s birth name as "Michelle LaVaughn Robinson" and her place of birth as Chicago, Illinois, which align with biographies and archival descriptions; those documents and mainstream references have been repeatedly cited to rebut conspiracy claims about her identity [1] [2] [3] [4]. Public fact-checking and archival reporting underscore that the documentary evidence available in the White House release is the primary public record used to confirm both name and birthplace [1] [2] [5].
1. What the official birth-certificate images show about name and place
The White House posted both a long-form and a short-form birth certificate for Michelle Obama, and those files explicitly display the baby’s given name as Michelle LaVaughn Robinson and list Chicago, Illinois as the place of birth; those released PDFs are the core primary-source images used in public verification [1] [2]. Complementary institutional biographies and historical summaries—such as the Barack Obama Presidential Library and encyclopedic profiles—repeat the same facts: Michelle LaVaughn Robinson, born January 17, 1964, in Chicago, Illinois, to Fraser Robinson III and Marian Shields Robinson [4] [3] [6].
2. What details on a birth certificate typically corroborate identity claims
A birth certificate routinely contains a newborn’s full name, date and place of birth, parent names, and attendant or facility information; those standard fields are the pieces reporters and researchers cite when confirming a person’s birth name and birthplace, and they are present in the Obama-era released certificates and described in institutional analyses of such documents [7] [8]. Thus, confirming a person’s birthplace and birth name relies on those consistent data fields rather than on isolated items or third-party paraphrases [7].
3. How mainstream sources and archives treat the record
Major reference works and archived White House material uniformly present Michelle Obama’s birth name and birthplace in the same terms—Michelle LaVaughn Robinson, born in Chicago on January 17, 1964—citing either the primary records or official biographies; this convergence of archival releases and multiple reputable outlets forms the evidentiary basis used by historians and fact-checkers [1] [2] [3] [4] [6]. The consistency across archival PDFs and encyclopedic entries reduces ambiguity about the basic documentary facts.
4. How misinformation has tried to unsettle those facts, and how it’s been addressed
Persistent online conspiracy theories have attempted to cast doubt on Michelle Obama’s birth certificate and identity, but fact-checking outlets and archival documentation have repeatedly debunked those claims and pointed back to the official certificates and public records; PolitiFact and AP News have fact-checked and rebutted specific false narratives about her identity, and multiple debunking posts note the availability and content of the certificates [5] [9] [10]. Reporting on the subject also shows how misread or altered images and fabricated stories have been used to sow doubt, while the actual document fields—name and birthplace—remain consistent in the public records [1] [2] [9].
5. Limits of the public record and what cannot be asserted from these sources
The released birth-certificate PDFs and institutional biographies demonstrate the birth name and birthplace as recorded publicly, but if additional original-state-file documentation beyond the White House PDFs is sought—such as certified state copies, hospital logs, or contemporaneous filing paperwork—those specific, more granular primary records are not included among the sources cited here and cannot be claimed to have been reviewed for this piece [1] [2]. Reporting thus rests on the authoritative White House releases and the consistent secondary summaries; where sources do not provide additional original-state files, that gap must be acknowledged rather than presumed closed [1] [2].