Genealogy Chat

On the FreeBMD site you can find a link on the homepage which takes you to a page of graphs (one for births, one for marriages and one for deaths) which shows the % covered year by year. nell

Brenda It's possible, yes. Technically babies who were born alive, even if they only took one breath, were supposed to have their birth registered. In practise it probably didn't work out like that. But their death would have to have been regisistered (otherwise burial arrangements could get complicated).

Would it be possible that a child who died at 6 weeks would not have been registered at all? brenda

And just to add to the confusion......... Registration of births was compulsory within 6 weeks, but although there wasn't a penalty for non-registration until 1874, there was a fine for late registration (7s 6d), which put some people off. Then there were those parents who deliberately evaded registration because they needed to hide a child's real age so that when the time came they could send that child out to work and no-one would realise they were underage (rules on child labour were changing regularly). There were also parents who genuinely believed registration wasn't necessary if the child had been baptised. I believe non-registration was generally higher in the towns and cities where people moved about a lot, so it was much harder for the registrar to keep track. To compound the situation even more, the registrar was paid a sum for each registration, but remuneration per event inevitably led to cases of fraudulent registration - children being registered twice under different forenames and the registration of children who didn’t exist. Is it any wonder then, that occasionally we can't find any trace of an ancestor's sibling getting married etc?.....perhaps he never existed in the first place. Cazza

It's a lot worse than that. It's estimated that around 50,000 marriages are missing from GRO between between 1837 and 1900. In some areas up to 15% of births were not registered 1837-1885. As Jeanie says many can be found on local registrars that never got to GRO. Many of the early indexes were burnt after they were re-typed and more errors introduced It's all a bit sad but true. Bob

Even the 1837 have missed a few. If you are lucky enough to have your family on UKBMD, done from local records, you can often find some that have been missed. Regards jeanie

Hi Karl If you mean FreeBMD then this site isn't fully transcribed yet. As you know it is a free to search site and relies on voluteers giving up their own time to transcribe the records. There is a place somewhere on the site where you can find out how much has been done for the year and area. If you are prepared to fork out a few quid then the 1837 site lists all BMD registrations from the beginning of civil registration in July 1837 up until 2002 I think it is. Still you must bear in mind that there will be a few BMDs that weren't registered at all and you will probably have to take a look at the parish registers to find them. Hope this helps Jeanette x

HELLO RESEARCHERS, CAN ANY BODY EXPLAIN WHY THERE WERE FEW NAMES MISSING FROM THE B,M,D, INDEX FILES, DURING MY RESEARCH ON MY LIGGETTS FAMILY, FROM TOXTETH PARK & LIVERPOOL AREA, I SOMETIMES CAME ACROSS SOME NAMES ON THE GRAVESTONES WHICH IS NOT LISTED IN THE BIRTH OR DEATH INDEX! OR SOMETIMES NAMES APEARED IN THE 1861 TO 1901 CENSUS RETURNS DONT HAVE ANY BIRTH INDEX! ALSO IN THE 1900s MARRIAGES IN THE PARISH CHURCH RECORDS NOT MENTION IN THE MARRIAGE INDEX! HOW CAN THESE THINGS MISSED OUT OR OVERLOOKED! WHEN I SUDDENLY RELISED NOT ALL B,M,& D ARE LISTED ON THE INDEX , CAN ANYBODY EXPLAIN! FROM KARL LIGGETT --MERSYSIDE.