Gather certificates

On 1 July 1837 it became compulsory in England and Wales to register births, marriages or deaths with the state – a process known as civil registration. Scotland followed suit on 1 January 1855, and Ireland on 1 January 1864.

The legacy of these bureaucratic landmarks – designed to keep a track of Britain’s ever-expanding population – is a wealth of documentary evidence, the building blocks of any family history.

Grasping how these records are organised will make it easier for you to find the relevant information for your ancestor. Each ‘event’ – that’s family-history-speak for a birth, marriage or death (BMD) – was recorded by a local registrar.

Every three months, the registrar forwarded the details they had collected to the General Register Office (GRO), which indexed them in quarterly volumes, arranged alphabetically by surname.
 

Consulting the GRO indexes online

From this centralised index you need to extract the reference number relating to the event you are interested in, allowing you to order a duplicate certificate. Several websites offer access to the GRO indexes, either pay-per-view or as part of subscription. Try: www.ancestry.co.uk, www.familyrelatives.com, www.findmypast.com, www.thegenealogist.co.uk, www.genesreunited.com. A name search locates the relevant page of the GRO index – scroll around until you find the name you’re looking for.

Note that you won’t be able to view a certificate online – except in the case of ScotlandsPeople.
www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk offers a free name search of Scottish GRO indexes – you can then pay to search for births, deaths and marriages and view the certificate online.
 
Also try:
www.freebmd.org.uk – a collaborative project aiming to create a free searchable database of the indexes – so far it is nearly complete up to 1911.
www.ukbmd.org.uk – a portal for local authorities offering free online access to regional BMD indexes.

Consulting the GRO indexes in person

If you prefer a hands-on approach, the National Archives in Kew should be the first port of call for those with roots in England and Wales.

Scots have a separate registry – the General Register Office for Scotland – at New Register House in Edinburgh, while Irish records are divided between the General Register Office of Northern Ireland (Belfast), and the General Register Office of Ireland (Dublin). In addition, local records offices will hold indexes relevant to their area.

The GRO website has a guide to where these are held under ‘Holders of the GRO indexes’

By visiting these places in person you’ll also be able to draw upon the extensive expertise of the archivists, who are usually happy to offer guidance to a bewildered beginner.
 

Years of political upheaval, including a fire at Ireland’s Public Record Office in 1922, have destroyed many irreplaceable Irish records – this makes researching ancestors on the Emerald Isle a considerably more difficult task.

Finding a certificate

The same principles apply whether you consult the GRO index online or at one of the nation’s many archive facilities. Using the information you have, search for a known event – your mother’s birth, for example. Events are separated by type – births, marriages, deaths – and for each year there are four quarterly volumes.

Which quarterly volume the event you are looking for appears in depends on when it was registered, not the actual date of the event itself. Remember that births can be registered up to six weeks after the event – so you may find a baby born in November or December of one year registered in the first quarter of the next. Finding their entry in the register is only the first step and garners only limited information. To get the full story you will need to order the certificate, which you can do online at www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/certificates/.

If the name you're looking for is a common one, you may spot several possible candidates listed in the indexes. Be as sure as you can that you’ve identified the correct individual before ordering a certificate – at £7 a pop, the costs soon mount up if you have to order several before finding who you’re looking for. Irritating perhaps, but entirely necessary – a wrong step at this early stage could lead you to waste valuable time inadvertently investigating someone else’s family!
 

What if you can’t find who you’re looking for?

Because the GRO records are secular almost everyone will feature (the same does not apply with earlier records – see the section on parish registers).

If you can’t find the event you are looking for it is a possibility that it was never registered, but there are other more likely explanations:

- You might be wrong about when the event happened – try widening your search by a couple of years either side of the date you think it occurred.

- The name by which you know them is not the one under which the event was recorded, or has been spelled differently.

- The information on the relevant certificate has been transcribed inaccurately, preventing you from finding it.
 

You don’t need to track down every possible certificate before moving on to the next stage – use the information you glean from each new BMD in conjunction with the other keystone of family history research: census returns.