Who Do You Think You Are? Encyclopedia of Genealogy: The definitive reference guide to tracing your family history. Nick Barratt
GRO, whilst there are also indexes to the certificates available locally. It is crucial to remember that the index entries in the local registers are not the same as the ones available at the GRO as each office would use their own indexing system.
Local Registration
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 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