FBI Chicago report on Murray Humphreys, 1961: inquiry into his birth and citizenship (Vault Humphreys Part 10)
The FBI reports that Humphreys told immigration investigators in 1953 he was born April 20, 1899 in Chicago, that no Chicago birth certificate was found, and that school records show a Llewellyn Humphreys born April 20 or April 4, 1899. An informant's 1960 suggestion of foreign birth is called a possibility, not a probability.
- Date
- 1961
- Kind
- case-file
- Retrieved
- 2026-10-12
- Docket
- Chicago file 92-348
- Rights
- A record of the Federal Bureau of Investigation released under FOIA through the FBI Vault. A work of the United States government, public domain under 17 U.S.C. § 105.
The report explains (p. 199) that the inquiry was made “to determine whether there is any possibility” that Humphreys was not a born citizen of the United States. It records that he told Immigration and Naturalization Service investigators in 1953 that he was born April 20, 1899 in Chicago, one of ten children; that the Cook County vital-statistics records held no birth certificate for him, since Illinois law did not require births to be recorded before 1916; and that school records show a Llewellyn Humphreys, born April 20 or April 4, 1899, attending the Haven School in 1904-1906. It gives his father’s name and the years of his parents’ deaths.
An informant had said in 1960 that there was “a possibility, although not a probability,” that Humphreys was not born in the United States. That is the informant’s suggestion as the FBI recorded it; the report does not adopt it.
This archive treats the 1899 date as Humphreys’s own statement, supported by the school records the FBI cites, and not as a birth record. Family members other than the parents are not named here. This archive read the page through the Vault viewer’s OCR text layer. The scans are poor; names, dates and figures can be garbled, and many names are redacted under FOIA exemptions (b6, b7C, b7D).
