The claim: Video demonstrates there are no birth records for child Uvalde victims

A video circulating on social media purports to demonstrate there are no birth records for the 19 children who died in the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School, painting this as evidence that the shooting was supposedly staged.

The eight-minute clip begins with a slide that asks, "Uvalde School 'Massacre': Can We Find Evidence That Any of the Child 'Victims,' As Described, Were Ever Born?" 

It appears to show searches on Ancestry.com and FindAGrave.com for each of the 19 youngest Uvalde victims. For all but one name, which produces a record for someone who died in 2012, the search results are empty.

"NO BIRTH RECORD For ANY of The Uvalde Massacre Child Victims," the video is captioned in a June 7 Facebook post that was shared more than 540 times in one month. The same headline introduced the clip in articles and on Bitchute.

But the video offers no evidence for these claims. The lack of a birth record on Ancestry.com and FindAGrave.com does not mean the record does not exist.

Ancestry.com does not have state-issued birth record indexes for people born in Texas after 1997, a spokesperson told USA TODAY, which means it would not have records for the 17 victims who were born there in 2011 and 2012. Florida and Illinois, where the two other children were born, have laws that prevent public disclosure of recent birth records. 

Follow us on Facebook! Like our page to get updates throughout the day on our latest debunks

USA TODAY reached out to users who shared the claim for comment.

Websites searched don't have recent birth records

The video relies on searches of Ancestry.com and FindAGrave.com to claim there aren't official records for the victims, but neither is a comprehensive database of recent births in the U.S. It also misrepresents one victim's record to claim she died in 2012, not 2022.

Find A Grave, a subsidiary of Ancestry.com that began as a platform for people to locate celebrity graves, does not use comprehensive historical records, its website says. It wouldn't have birth records for the Uvalde victims unless their families uploaded that information to the site.