No UK birth or death certificates issued????
Hi, Has anybody else had the problem that they've ancestors who no birth certificated were issued. I've ordered Birth Certs from GRO in the UK where I've traced ancestors' year of birth through census records and marriage records but no Birth certificates have seemed to be issued. Is this a common problem??? All these ancestors were born well after 1837 when certificates were first issued.
|
Re: No UK birth or death certificates issued????
it is possible that births were not registered (deaths also, but less likely) - have you actually found the relevant entry in the GRO indexes and used those to order the copies ?
It may be the information they gave on the census for age or place of birth was wrong.
|
Re: No UK birth or death certificates issued????
there's no entry in GRO indexes for the birth dates of them, I was under the impression that it was law in the UK after 1837 to register all BMD's. It's strange because the people who are'nt registered, some of their siblings are..... and it seemed to be about a third of my direct ancestors were not registered..... a couple of these were in the early 1900s also
|
Re: No UK birth or death certificates issued????
It is not a common problem, the GRO used to reckon that a very small percentage of births went unrecorded, fewer deaths and even fewer actual marriages (though of course not ever couple who claimed to be married had gone through a recognised ceremony). The usual reasons are:- that the birth took place at a time or place that you are not expecting, the information was recorded incorrectly at the time (not that unexpected if the person was only partly literate and had a broad accent with which the registrar was unfamiliar, and add to that not all the registrars were as literate as you might expect) the record has been miss-indexed by the GRO (rare, but I have an example in my tree), the index has been miss transcribed on its way to Ancestry. Not unusual at all, I' sorry to say. Check variations in spelling, check with just the family name around the date and place you expect and see if the given name is shown correctly. Check using just the given name (very useful if it's an unusual name). Good luck Rob
|
Re: No UK birth or death certificates issued????
Some births did slip through unregistered, but it is more likley that the entry has been wrongly indexed, or took place in a different place.
Don't rely on the Ancestry (or anyone elses index transcriptions), go through the actual GRO index page image yourself on screen to check for an entry - I have seen whole chunks of entries which have been missed by the indexeing systems.
|
Re: No UK birth or death certificates issued????
Whilst as others have said there are some gaps in the registration of BMDs after 1837, the further that you go forward from that date the less that there are. There are also a few other things to bear in mind:
Maybe the event was registered in a different office to the one that you expect. For instance my mother lived in Wales, but died in London, and that is where her death is registered, which might not be where people expect.
Maybe the spelling of the names is not what you expect. Don't forget that in the early times of registration many people were illiterate and so the registrar wrote what he heard, and no one would or could check it. My mother's maiden name was Gambold, but I can point to instances of where it was register as GamboUld, or Gambol, or Gambell etc.
The are known instances of where the local register has not been full transferred to the overall GRO one. So if you have checked the overall GRO one and can't find an entry it may well be worth a visit to the applicable local registry office.
|
Re: No UK birth or death certificates issued????
I had my credit card entry returned and no reason given. They had the record but no certificate was ever issued I guess.
|