Who Do You Think You Are? Encyclopedia of Genealogy: The definitive reference guide to tracing your family history

The original certificates for each registration district are held at the superintendent registrar’s office. Each major city would have one of these offices and there would be numerous superintendent offices per county. However, due to some boundary changes throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries some of these offices may have been abolished and their records transferred to another office nearby. Each local register office is likely to have indexed the information by local district, year and then alphabetically (probably by first letter of surname only and not in strict alphabetical order). Hence in order to begin searching you will need to know the superintendent district and then the sub-district. The advantage of searching in the local registers is that it will be a quicker search to conduct, especially if the name you are looking for is relatively common. However, if you are not certain where the registration occurred, it is advisable to turn to the national GRO indexes.

National GRO Indexes

To order a duplicate certificate, you need to identify the relevant entry in the national indexes and note several pieces of information:

• The name of the individual (arranged in strict alphabetical order by surname)

• The name of the local district where the registration occurred

• The two-part numerical reference (the first being a code for the superintendent district and the second number a reference to the page where the certificate will be found)

Until October 2007, the national paper indexes were held at the Family Records Centre in Islington, London, before they were moved to Christchurch, Dorset; but they are no longer available for public inspection. Two projects are underway to create an online digital index service known as MAGPIE, linked to the Digitization of Vital Events (DoVE) project whereby the actual certificates would be made available as well. However, many commercial companies have created their own digital images and searchable databases of the GRO indexes – a topic that will be covered shortly – whilst the national GRO indexes have also been copied onto microfiche, and many local libraries and record offices hold copies. All duplicate certificates located on these national indexes have to be ordered online via the GRO website, www.gro.gov.uk, where you’ll also find details of how to complete the necessary forms and pay for the certificates and the expected length of time it will take to deliver.

‘Certificates give vital information about social status, place of residence and occupation.’

This is where you are likely to incur the most cost when building your family tree. At the time of going to press, each certificate will cost you £7 to purchase from the GRO, and takes a minimum of four days from receipt of order to dispatch of duplicate certificate. You can order a certificate on 24-hour turnaround, but these cost £23 so patience is probably a virtue! Despite these costs, you will need to order (where possible) a birth, marriage and death certificate for each direct ancestor, as the clues they contain will not only allow you to work back generation by generation but will also give you important information about their social status, place of residence and occupation.

Common Problems

Although it was a statutory obligation to register all births, marriages and deaths from 1 July 1837, you may well experience difficulties in finding an entry even though it should be included. There are numerous reasons behind this:

Late Registration

Often people would not register punctually. If you do not find an entry in the appropriate quarterly index, keep searching as it may well turn up later. A common mistake is to assume a marriage occurred at least nine months prior to a birth. This is by no means always the case, with people rushing to marry before a birth to avoid the stigma of having an illegitimate child.

Lack of Registration

Unfortunately, not every single event was registered. This was particularly the case in the early period of civil registration as some people treated the legal requirement to register with a degree of suspicion. Additionally, until the 1874 Act it was the responsibility of the local registrar to note down the event rather than that of each individual, and many people did not bother to report events to the registrar.

Some studies have estimated that as many as 15 per cent of births would not have been registered in the early years until the rules were changed from 1875, rising to as high as 33 per cent in some urban areas. Indeed, parents would attempt to hide the age of their children in order to send them to work as young as possible (child labour was being regulated by statute through various acts in the nineteenth century). Ignorance also played a part, as it was often not realized that registration was still required even if the child had been baptized, many people believing the church ceremony should be adequate. Hence, if the birth is not found, you should check the relevant parish records.

There are fewer gaps in the registration of marriages, although again it may be worthwhile consulting the local parish registers (see Chapter 7 (#ub70b92e7-f549-5fe0-ae17-f472861d772c) for more information) to try and find a marriage this way, as some marriages in the early days of civil registration may have been recorded by the Church only. Additionally, some people lived as man and wife without actually ever marrying (legally it was the responsibility of those accusing the couple of having an ‘invalid’ marriage to prove it). This could be the case when people had separated but not formally divorced and remarriage was not an option.

The most complete set of registration certificates should be for deaths, but even some of these were missed in the early years of civil registration. Again it might be worthwhile searching for the burial in the appropriate parish, if known.

It is possible that the birth, marriage or death being searched for did not occur in England or Wales, and you may have to search in the Irish or Scottish records, discussed below. Alternatively, events may well have occurred overseas whilst a member of your family was on board a ship, serving in the armed forces or working in a colony in the British Empire. Information about looking for overseas civil registration is also discussed below.

‘An incorrect entry into the index is the most common reason for not finding an entry.’

Incorrect Index Entry

This is possibly the most common reason for not finding an entry, the mis-transcription by the clerk originally entering the information. Unfortunately, this was not so uncommon, especially in the earlier registers when everything was handwritten, making it difficult to read original certificates and therefore entering an index entry in the wrong place was an easy mistake to make. Certain letters are easily confused and this should be borne in mind when thinking of variant spellings:

• A capital handwritten B, P, D or even K can be easily confused

• It can be difficult to distinguish a ‘t’ from an ‘l’, an ‘m’ from an ‘n’ or an ‘e’ from an ‘i’ when handwritten

• As letters were often handwritten with large loops they could be easily misread and confused

• Some surnames have common variant spellings. For example ‘Matthews’ may be spelt ‘Mathews’, ‘Doherty’ as ‘Docherty’ or ‘Johnson’ as ‘Jonson’. Certain forenames may also have alternative spellings, such as ‘Sarah’ for ‘Sara’, ‘Conor’ for ‘Conner’ or ‘Coner’, or ‘Jane’ for ‘Jayne’.

Each step in the registration process could lead to a misspelling. Hence, by the time an entry has been placed in the national indexes the name could have altered a great deal. Thus if you have encountered a problem in the national indexes, try searching the local registers.

Another problem is that in the nineteenth century spellings were not necessarily uniform and some people spelt their names differently at various times. The relatively low level of literacy would also lead to inaccuracies as it would not be possible for people to ensure their names were spelt properly. In such circumstances the individual writing down the information would have to spell the name phonetically, which could lead to problems with uncommon surnames.

The last thing to remember is the use of nicknames, as information may be recorded either as the full correct name or as the more informal nickname. Hence, when looking for the birth of an ‘Anthony’, ‘James’ or ‘Nicholas’, remember to search for the shortened versions of these names – ‘Tony’, ‘Jim’ or ‘Nick’ – if you have no joy.

Online GRO Indexes

The growth of the Internet in the past 10 years has seen a huge growth of genealogical websites. Many commercial ventures have invested a large amount of time and money in digitizing many genealogical documents, including the GRO indexes and some local registers. It is now possible to search for your certificates online and, depending on which website you choose, many of these searches are also free of charge. Below is a list of some of the most useful online sources.

www.freebmd.org.uk

This is a free-to-view website run by volunteers who have been manually transcribing each single index entry in the GRO indexes. At the time of going to print the team has transcribed over 135 million records, with entries being relatively complete from 1837 to about 1915. It is an ongoing project and it is hoped that the whole period of civil registration will eventually be covered.

The main advantage of this site is that you can search for a particular name through a number of quarters all at once, rather than having to search through each quarter one by one. If you do find a relevant entry on the website it is advisable to double-check the entry with the original entry before ordering, in case of any transcription error.

www.ancestry.co.uk

This is the largest commercial genealogical website geared to the UK market currently on the Internet. Although many of its databases are only accessible upon payment, it is possible to search the GRO indexes online free of charge after registering your details on the website. Ancestry has scanned images of each page of the GRO indexes for every quarter, which means you need to search for an entry by going through each quarter at a time, as there is no single-name database or digital image of each individual entry.

www.findmypast.com

This is another commercial genealogical website. It has placed the GRO indexes on its website in a similar fashion to Ancestry, by digitally scanning each page of every quarter for the entire civil registration period. Again, due to the digitization process you still need to search through each quarter as not every entry has been individually scanned. It is not free of charge but runs a pay-per-view service.

www.familyrelatives.com

Family Relatives have also provided online access to digitized GRO indexes. There are fully transcribed searchable indexes for the periods 1866–1920 and 1984–2005, whilst it is possible to search the periods 1837–65 and 1921–83 by surname and browse the GRO index images. To use this service, you need to register as a user, log in and buy credits.

Along with placing the GRO indexes online, certain local archives and record offices are investing in placing their local registrar indexes online too. There are websites such as www.ukbmd.org.uk, which lists which local indexes have been transcribed or placed online.

Civil Registration of Britons Overseas

Millions of Britons have worked overseas in the armed forces, as civil servants in one of the colonial administrations that comprised the British Empire, or on board a vessel travelling between foreign parts. Although they were not incorporated in the main national or local civil registration indexes, attempts were made to register as many of these people as possible, and the records are analysed here.

Overseas registers have been kept by the GRO and duplicate certificates can be purchased via the links on the GRO website www.gro.gov.uk once you’ve found the correct registration reference. There are indexes available on microfiche at The National Archives at Kew and other archives, or online at www.findmypast.com. These are broken down by period and type, covering:

• General indexes from 1966

• Colonial and ex-colonial indexes, 1940–81

• Civilian indexes 1849–1965, consular registers of births, marriages and deaths

• Civilian indexes 1837–1965, marine registers of births and deaths

• Civilian indexes 1947–65, air registers of births and deaths

• Civilian indexes, various foreign registers