| Birth,
marriage and death certificates
|
From 1st July 1837 all births, marriages and deaths had to be
registered by law.
If you have enough information on the person you are looking
for then these certificates can be ordered from the General
Register Office.
If you are not so sure of names and dates then you
may need to do your own research and look through the GRO indexes
yourself. This can be done online or at various record offices
which hold copies of the indexes.
The different certificates contain a variety of information,
of most interest is the birth certificate from which the names
of the parents can be found together with the maiden name of
the mother. The marriage certificate is also of particular interest
in that it names both fathers of the bride and groom.
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| Parish
registers : Baptism, marriage and burial records |
Before registering became
mandatory in 1837 the available records were mainly restricted
to the parish registers which recorded all events which took
place at a church such as baptisms, marriages and burials. These
records, depending on the parish, can go back as far as 1538.
The baptism, marriage and burial records are kept at local record
offices - see counties
- or sometimes at the churches themselves. The Society
of Genealogists in London has a copy covering the whole
country. Local
libraries
may also hold registers.
The International
Genealogical Index has millions of baptism and marriage
records available online. The National
Burial Index is an incomplete but extensive collection of
burials available on CD-ROM. Both these resources are transcriptions
and therefore prone to error and so the original registers should
always be checked if possible.
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