Genealogy Chat

Can anyone tell me if its possible to be missing from the birth index, I am filling siblings of my husbands parents and have found it impossible to find his aunt who he says is the youngest born around about 1947 and i have search the index from well before she was born and a fair bit after she was born, but I can,t find her.

Yes it is possible that a birth never made it to the index.

This usually happens because the original registration is made at the local register office and the details are then passed to what we now call the GRO to create the national index.

During the process the detaisl can be written down and shuffled around several times to create the alphabetical index, errors and missing entries can be the result of all the shuffling around of entries.

A local reg office is usually the answer, they do not have to deal with the same quantity as the GRO and don't need to arrange things alphabetically, they retain their register chronologically instead.

Given the date is there a possibility that she was perhaps adopted within the family or something similiar? Perhaps raised by an aunt or uncle who claimed to be her parents?

Or possibly given one name at birth and then known by another name throughout her life, it's suprising just how often that can happen.


Glen

I had this problem with my own grandmother and her 3 siblings. One missing I could understand as a simple mistake, but ALL FOUR?

Eventually, because she had an unusual combination of forenames, I searched on Ancestry without a surname (until then, I hadn't realised you could do this), and there she was - registered under her mother's mis-spelled maiden name.

The other 3 are still proving to be a problem. I have the impression that the parents were not very bright, as their names differ on some census returns, and it could well be that they simply did not known of the need for registration.

As they say: "The truth is out there, somewhere."

Ed

If you cannot find a BMD on the index it is always worth trying the registry office that it was registered at,

As Glen said they don't all make it onto the GRO index,

Roy