Baby Named ‘Unakite Thirteen Hotel’ in Error. Her Dad Still Can’t Change It.

A 49-year-old single father in Nebraska is having a really hard time trying to get an identification card for his two-year-old daughter after he found out that she does not have a Social Security number. On top of that, even though he calls her Caroline, her legal name is “Unakite Thirteen Hotel.”

In case you were wondering, no, Unakite Thirteen Hotel does not have any familial significance or any other type of significance to the 49-year-old Nebraskan, Jason Kilburn. It is a string of utter nonsense that was auto-generated by a computer system. How that happened is a little complicated. Undoing it is proving to be even more complicated.

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Nebraska Dad Is Having A Hard Time Changing His Daughter’s Name from “Unakite Thirteen Hotel” to Caroline

A couple of years ago, Kilburn was dating a woman that he later found out gave birth to a little girl that might have been his. The woman had been struggling with drug issues and homelessness. Knowing she was in no condition to take care of the child, she handed the little girl over to the hospital. She moved into foster care until custody was officially granted to Kilburn.

Caroline, or Unakite Thirteen Hotel, was born in Iowa. She needed all the requisite paperwork and identification every human American needs. When Kilburn tried to get it so they could access crucial services like healthcare and childcare, he found out that the hospital issued an unofficial certificate of live birth that had on it the bizarre placeholder name Unakite Thirteen Hotel.

No Social Security number was generated and no official birth certificate was issued. For some reason, the hospital computer system spits out a random string of words to use as a placeholder name.

Now Kilburn has teamed up with a lawyer tasked with taking on the Nebraska and Iowa Department of Health to help secure the legal documents, and perhaps a name change, he and his daughter need to move on with their lives—simple things they have so far not been granted as both state governments have been giving them the runaround, tossing one obstacle in their path after another.

Soon after this story went national, Kilburn finally got a Social Security number for Caroline. Now he’s just waiting for a birth certificate with her real name, Caroline Kilburn, on it.