Civil Registration

Birth, marriage & death (bmd) indexes

In 1837 it became compulsory in England & Wales to register all births, marriages and deaths at the register office in the district in which the event took place.

These events are recorded in books called registers, and when the registers are complete the entries are indexed, and the books handed over to the Superintendent Registrar for safe-keeping. The indexes are microfilmed and are available to the public to search.

If you know the district of an event and you want to obtain a certificate, you can go to the Register Office (usually by appointment), search the indexes and, if successful, buy a certificate. The certificate will be a copy of the original register entry.

Registration districts

Registration districts were created in 1837, and were divided into sub-districts, each of which had a Registrar responsible for the birth, marriage, death and census records within that sub-district. A district usually comprised a market town and its surrounding villages.

The districts do not always correspond with geographical counties, so it isn't always safe to make assumptions about the district in which you'll find a record.

Follow the link for detail about districts and sub-districts in England and Wales.

The Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies publishes maps of the registration districts - a very useful resource to have to hand when trying to find records.

Finding local indexes on the Internet

Some Register Offices, and many individuals and societies, are transcribing the indexes to make them available online. An internet search may tell you if the records you want are available. This can be a frustrating experience - not all indexes are transcribed, and many projects started aren't complete yet.

I have listed some of the sites where you can find local indexes (and many other local records). This page will never be complete as records are constantly coming online, but it is regularly updated, so if you don't find the records you are looking for, visit again, and they may be added in the future.

As well as transcribed indexes, it is often possible to buy copies of the indexes on CD. It may be worth searching County Genealogical, Family Research or Archaeological Societies, as many of them either transcribe records, or can provide indexes on CD. Where I know about them I have put links to them on the above-linked page.

GRO indexes

If you can't locate records in local indexes, or you don't know the district in which an event occurred, national GRO indexes will be the next place to search.

As well as local offices indexing their registers, every Superintendent Registrar copies his registers and sends the copies to the General Register Office, where they are all indexed again.

These are called the GRO indexes.

They are indexed quarterly - January to March, April to June, July to September, and October to December.

In themselves, GRO indexes don't tell you very much. They are simply alphabetical lists, by event and by quarter, of names, districts, volumes and page numbers. Transcriptions contain the same information as the indexes themselves.

Before you search you should already have a good idea of when an event occurred, and you may have gleaned this information in conjuntion with other records, like the census.

Where can I find GRO indexes?

As with local indexes, the GRO indexes are being transcribed by several organisations to make them available free online. However, none of the projects to do this is complete, and it will be several years before they are.

Probably the largest of these projects is at FreeBMD, with over 158,000,000 records in their database.

Ordering certificates

You won't need to order a certificate for every event.

Choose the events that will add a generation or prove a relationship.

In a large family you might want to see the birth certificates of the oldest and youngest children, particularly if there's a possibility an ancestor was married more than once, or you have a doubt about parentage.

Once you have found the record you believe is your ancestor's, by quoting the full GRO reference (Year, Qtr, District, Volume and Page), you can order a certificate directly from the General Records Office. The fee for this is £7.

I can't find the record I want

If you're looking in a particular quarter because you know the date of an event, don't forget that the indexes are compiled by date of registration and not date of event. If the event occurred on 20th December, for instance, it may not have been registered until January the following year, so a search in the following quarter might find the record.

Are you sure about the spelling of a name? When you search, try as many variations of a surname spelling as you can think of. Many searches will give you the option of a 'Soundex' search which, as it suggests, will search for names that sound like yours.

Remember that many people couldn't read or write, and names might be written as they sounded.

When reading transcribed records, be mindful of the fact that often these are transcribed from old Victorian style handwriting which is very difficult for a transcriber to read. Sometimes there's an element of guesswork.

Building a picture of our families

It's satisfying to put names and dates on your tree, but you will want to know more. Where did the families live? What jobs did they do? Where did they come from?

Census Records are the next step in learning about your family, and understanding what lives they might have led.