Who Do You Think You Are? Encyclopedia of Genealogy: The definitive reference guide to tracing your family history. Nick Barratt
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marriage and death certificates are crucially important for anyone wishing to research their ancestors.’
Civil Registration in England and Wales
In 1837, England and Wales were divided up into 27 registration districts, based upon the contemporary Poor Law Unions. Each district was administered by a Superintendent Registrar and was further subdivided into local districts staffed by local registrars. The original registration districts were reorganized in 1852 and their number increased to 33, with a further revision taking place in 1946. A Registrar General was appointed to be responsible for the entire system and was originally based in London.
The local registrar would record each birth or death and originally it was the responsibility of the official to collect this information. He would be expected to travel through his local district and record each birth within six weeks and each death within five days. As there was no onus placed on the family to report this information there may be some gaps in the early registers. The situation changed in 1874 with the passing of the Births and Deaths Registration Act. The burden of responsibility for reporting the information now lay with the family; fines were payable for late or non-registration from 1875 onwards.
Each event was recorded on a special form, with one copy retained by the registrar and one copy issued to the informant. The information compiled locally would then be sent to the superintendent registrar, who would in turn send a copy of all registrations in his district to the Registrar General in London on a quarterly basis.
The situation was slightly different for marriages. The clergy for churches that were officially authorized to record marriages were expected to send the quarterly returns straight to the Registrar General in London. Non-conformist churches had to have their buildings licensed to perform such ceremonies, with the local registrar being legally obliged to be present to record the details. However, from 1899 the situation changed thanks to the Marriage Act of 1898, and non-conformist clergy from these churches could also record and submit the information themselves.
Making the Most of Civil Registration Certificates
Every birth, marriage and death is recorded at a local Registry Office and a certificate is produced to confirm the details of each event, although the information on each type of certificate varies according to the country it was registered in. Each country has a centralized registration index arranged chronologically so you can research all of your ancestors from one place regardless of their geographic spread. It is essential to have evidence of at least each person’s birth and marriage on your tree. Even if you are starting with yourself, make sure you can locate your birth certificate and compare it with your parents’ marriage certificate to ensure all the names, occupations and dates match up.
This process should be repeated for every person on your tree. For example, if you have a birth certificate for Mary King, born in 1912 in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, which told you that her father was Herbert King, a railway fireman, and her mother was called Thirza King, formerly Payling, then you would expect her parents’ marriage certificate to be dated prior to 1912 and contain similar details. This marriage certificate would then tell you Thirza’s father’s name and that of Herbert’s and their occupations, giving you new information to work with. You would also expect Mary King’s own marriage certificate to confirm her year of birth, father’s name and occupation.
Death certificates are of less genealogical use than birth and marriage certificates because they tend to only really give information about the deceased individual. That is not to say it isn’t worthwhile ordering death certificates. They can tell us the deceased person’s age, which enables you to establish when they were born if you have nothing else to work from. Death certificates can be more helpful for ancestors who died shortly after the introduction of civil registration, because it will be more difficult to find information about them from other records. Apart from details about the cause of death, notes given on death certificates can lead you to other sources by giving details about a coroner’s inquest that might have taken place. If you know when and where an ancestor died (which will be recorded on the certificate) it also makes the hunt for a will and burial record easier.
Look out for the names of witnesses and informants on civil registration certificates. These people are often close family members and if you know their names, even if you are not yet sure exactly how they are related, you may be able to identify your ancestors in other documents, such as household census returns.
Research hints
There are general rules you can follow when searching for the births, baptisms, marriages, deaths and burials of ancestors you have never known even if you only have a rough idea of when they were alive:
1. If you start from the last known birth on your tree for which you have a birth certificate, say your grandmother’s birth certificate dated 1917 for example, this should give you her parents’ names. You can then search for a marriage under their names back from 1917. You may have to work back as much as twenty years to 1897 if your grandmother was the youngest of a large generation of children, but once you have found your great-grandparents’ marriage in the indexes you can order the certificate to find out their ages, which will enable you to then search for their birth certificates over a range of a few years.
2. Some marriage certificates do not give exact ages and will state ‘full age’ instead, meaning a person was over 21 years old, or will say ‘minor’ if they were less than 21 years old. Where this is the case you can search for that person’s birth date starting from around 16 years prior to the date on their marriage certificate and working back perhaps as many as 20 more years, if they married late in life. Starting a birth search 16 years prior to a marriage date also works well when searching parish registers, which rarely give ages.
3. If you are keen to find out when an ancestor died, the only way to do this from death and burial indexes is to establish the last known time they were alive and work forward from then. Perhaps your grandmother was a witness on her daughter’s marriage certificate in 1965, in which case you can conduct a search for your grandmother’s death from 1965 onwards. If you are looking for the death of a person who was born over 100 years ago, you would usually only need to search up until they would have been 100 years old. It is important to conduct a search for the longest period of time over which an event was likely to have occurred, particularly if you are looking for somebody with a common name.
4. When searching the birth, marriage and death indexes you will often come across more than one possible match, and the only way to find out which one is correct is to order the certificates for the most likely options and compare them against other information you have gathered for that person. If you are confident that you have conducted a thorough search of the indexes, then you will know that you have not missed anything.
As mentioned above, it was the duty of the local superintendent registrar to forward the information to the Registrar General in London. Therefore there are two sets of records: the original records held at the local registrar’s office and the copies held by the Registrar General. Once the records arrived at the Registrar General’s office in London, clerks would reorganize them. They made alphabetical indexes for the certificates, broken down on a quarterly basis. Currently, the general public has no legal right to view the original certificates held locally but only the copies held by the Registrar General, though you can order duplicate copies of the original records from local register offices. The records of the Registrar General for England and Wales are now in the General Register Office (GRO), which is a department of the Office of National Statistics, and duplicates can also be ordered online at www.gro.gov.uk. Separate arrangements exist for Scotland and Ireland, and are discussed later in this chapter.
What Do the Certificates Contain?
Birth Certificates
Birth certificates are the official record of the individual’s place and date of birth. As mentioned, each birth had to be recorded