Genealogy Chat

I have recently been looking at parish records that are held on microfiche and was surprised to find that a few entries post 1837 do not appear in the GRO records. Has anybody else found this? John

If they were births, then it was not compulsory to register births until the mid 1870s - so yes there will be quite a few missing from the GRO index.

If you are talking about births, then that will be becasue fines for non registration weren't introduced until 1875 so many births went unregistered. And for marriages and deaths, there will always be some that got 'miised' when the local registrar send the returns to the GRO. Sam x

And there will be some baptisms post-1837 for children who were born before 1837, so their births could not be registered anyway. Kate.

Apart from non registration there are several other reasons you may have missing GRO index entries. Local registrars had to send duplicates of the register for compiling into the national register. Records may have not been sent,or simply mislaid when they were being transcribed,imagine the task of sorting all the individual office entries into a national alphabetical,date ordered index.Whilst trying to ensure the details were correctly recorded at every stage it is understandable errors/ommisions did sometimes happen. Glen

The law wasn't tightened for deaths either, until 1875. Merry

Thanks for the replies. I assume that if there is no GRO entry then there is no birth certificate that can be obtained. John

It's worth checking with the local Reg Office as some entries got lost on their way to the GRO! Merry

The theory is a local office will have the same records as the GRO,but in practice there are often records held at the local register office which will not be held by the GRO,due to the reasons previously mentioned. Glen

John I currently hold six certificates for events in the 1860s, which do not appear in the GRO records, but which DO appear in the local Register Office records. They are all for the Manchester area. OC

I don´t know about missing GRO entries - what about missing GR threads !