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 within six weeks of the event, although this would not always happen, particularly if the family were travelling at the time of the birth, and waited to register it until they returned home.
The GRO birth indexes include all of England and Wales. Each entry is entered in alphabetical order, annually and then in the relevant quarter – March, June, September, December. All births registered between 1 January and 31 March are included in the March quarter; between 1 April and 30 June in the June quarter; between 1 July and 30 September in the September quarter; and between 1 October and 31 December in the December quarter. After 1984 the registers are arranged annually and not on a quarterly basis. An appropriate index reference number is also provided, which is the key piece of information needed to order the certificate. From the September quarter of 1911 the maiden name of the mother was also included in the index entry.
The actual certificates provide the following information:
• Where and when born: The precise date and location of the birth; if the exact time is given it signifies that it was a multiple birth (possibly twins or triplets). In this case you may wish to search for the other sibling(s), who should have the same surname and registration reference.
• Name (if any): This should be the full name given, including any middle names (the index will only give the initials of any middle names given). Some parents would change the name (this was allowed up to one year following registration). In such a scenario both the original and the altered name should appear. Sometimes a birth would be registered even though no first name had been chosen. This explains the ‘if any’ in brackets on the certificate. In the indexes there are also entries at the end of surnames for ‘male’ or ‘female’, used when the first name had yet to be decided.
• Name and surname of the father: The full name of the father.
• Name and maiden surname of the mother: The full name of the mother, including her ‘former’ (maiden) name; this last piece of information is particularly useful when trying to trace the maternal line further back. You may also find evidence of a prior divorce in this section too.
• Rank and profession of father: This provides the occupation of the father. This is a good genealogical clue, determining the social status of your ancestor. You may also be able to use this piece of information to search for employment records for your ancestor. Bear in mind, however, it would not be that uncommon for people to ‘inflate’ the status of their occupation.
• Signature, description and residence of informant: This is the individual who registered the birth. In most cases it would be the father, but not always. Sometimes there is a mark instead of a signature, indicating the informant was illiterate.
• When registered: The date the birth was officially registered; don’t forget, this could be up to six weeks after the actual birth, so if you think your ancestor was born in late March,
