| 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 for a fee directly
from the General
Register Office in Southport. You can telephone or apply
by post (the application forms can be downloaded from their
website).
If you are not so sure of names and dates then you
would need to visit the Family
Records Centre in London and look through the indexes there
to find the reference for the entry you are looking for. With
this reference you can then apply to Southport. Family history
societies may also have copies of these indexes as may local
libraries
- see the Familia
website to see which libraries hold what.
There are several online resources which can save you a visit
to a record office. FreeBMD
is a database of millions of entries (but not all) from 1837
up until 1983. Here if you find the entry you are looking for
you can extract the reference needed to apply to Southport.
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 - see the Familia
website to see which libraries hold what.
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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