Who Do You Think You Are? Encyclopedia of Genealogy: The definitive reference guide to tracing your family history

A fairly quick search revealed that a Margaret J. Oddie, mother’s maiden name Clegg, was born in the March quarter of 1940. On ordering the certificate (above, left), her parents were listed as Harry Oddie and Lilian Oddie, née Clegg – the same as Bill’s. This therefore was his missing sister, and a further search of the death indexes showed that she had died as an infant the same quarter, explaining why Bill never knew about her existence.

Marriage Certificates

A marriage certificate is the official record of when and where a marriage took place, in addition to the record that would have been compiled in the relevant religious institution (a parish register, for example; these have been kept since the sixteenth century, and continue to be compiled today – see Chapter 7 for more details). They are a particularly rich source for the genealogical researcher as they give lots of clues for various ancestors. As mentioned above, from 1837 onwards, marriages of individuals of the Church of England, along with Jews and Quakers (where buildings were licensed to hold marriages), were recorded by the priest or responsible clerk and sent to the General Registrar’s Office in London. For other non-conformists, the local registrar recorded the marriage. This requirement was relaxed in 1898 and an ‘authorized person’ from other religious denominations could also record this information and send it forward to the appropriate bodies.

It is important to remember the age of consent before conducting a marriage search. In 1929 it was raised to 16 years for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Prior to this it had been 14 for boys and 12 for girls. In the Republic of Ireland the age of consent was only raised to 16 in 1975, having been kept at the ages of 14 for boys and 12 for girls until then. It’s worth bearing these ages in mind when searching for marriage certificates, making sure you search back far enough. The age of consent, however, differs from the legal age at which people could marry without parental consent, and in England and Wales this was 21 until 1969, after which it was reduced to 18 – though in Scotland it is as low as 16.

The GRO indexes include an entry for both the bride and the groom. If you know the names of both parties who were married it is advisable to search for the least common surname. The registers are arranged annually and then on a quarterly basis. They are then indexed alphabetically by the surname and then forename of the bride and groom. From the March quarter of 1912 the surname of the spouse is also given. Lastly there will be a numerical reference for the marriage.

The actual certificate will provide the following information:

• Above the columns there will be a section stating exactly where the marriage took place (which church or other place) and in which parish and county. This is very useful as it can indicate whether your ancestors were non-conformists or not.

• When married: The exact date the marriage took place.

• Name and surname: The full names of both parties getting married.

• Age: The given age of the bride and groom; it is important to note that these may not be entirely accurate. It was not uncommon for people to state that they were simply of a ‘full’ age or even a ‘minor’ age. Prior to 1969, full age would be someone aged over 21 years and a minor anyone younger than 21. Thus it could be problematic working out the exact ages when trying to find the birth records of these people. Also, it was not uncommon for people to lie about their age, depending on the circumstance. People under 21 may claim to be several years older to avoid the need for parental consent. Alternatively, older women marrying men significantly younger than them may give a younger age to minimize any potential scandal.

• Condition: This column states whether the marrying party was a bachelor, spinster or widow/widower. You may be surprised to find out that your relatively young ancestor was already widowed and marrying for a second time. However, mortality rates would have been significantly higher in the early period of civil registration and sometimes people lost their spouses quite soon after marriage, particularly in childbirth. Remarriage was therefore a viable practice, especially with young widowed men with small children who needed a maternal figure to look after them.

• Rank or profession: The occupation of the two parties is stated here. In the same way as with the occupation section in birth certificates, be aware of exaggerations and, depending on the given occupation, whether you will be able to locate their employment records. Female occupations were not regularly detailed until the twentieth century.

• Residence at the time of the marriage: The address of the bride and groom at the time of their wedding; the usual custom was to be married in the parish of the bride and sometimes the groom would have a temporary address in that same parish, as he would have had to have been living in the parish for a month to be married there.

• Father’s name and surname: A vital clue for the genealogical researcher, helping one get one generation further back at the same time, although the mother’s name would not be given. If the father was deceased it would often (but not always) be recorded as ‘deceased’ in brackets after the father’s name.

• Rank or profession of father: The occupation of the father of both bride and groom is provided. Again, be aware of the same inaccuracies in the given occupations.

• The type of marriage: Whether the marriage was performed by a marriage licence or banns, announced in the parish church for the three weeks preceding the wedding.

• Name and signature of two witnesses: At least two people are required to witness the marriage. These would often, but not always, be family members of the bride and groom.

CASE EXAMPLE

Marriage certificates

To trace Bill Oddie’s family further back in time, it was necessary to verify the personal details of each generation and order the necessary certificates. This meant starting at the beginning by obtaining the marriage certificate (left) of his parents, Harry Oddie and Lilian Clegg, in 1938. The GRO indexes were examined, and an entry quickly found in the December quarter. The certificate was ordered, and contained the following information.

Marriage at the Methodist Church, William Street, Rochdale

Groom: Harry Oddie, 28, bachelor; occupation municipal clerk; address 17 Russell Street, Rochdale; father Wilkinson Oddie (deceased), loom overlooker

Bride: Lilian Clegg, 24, spinster; occupation shop assistant, general store: address 82 Grove Street, Rochdale; father Joseph Peter Clegg (deceased), engineer

Witnesses: Edgar Oddie, Marion Oddie

With this information other searches could be started. Harry and Lilian’s ages at marriage meant that their birth certificates were relatively easy to locate – Harry was born in 1910 and Lilian in 1914 – whilst searches could be started for their fathers’ death certificates as well, prior to 1938.

Death Certificates

These certificates record the time and cause of death. They are perhaps less obviously useful for people trying to take generations further back, but can give a useful picture of the social standing and life conditions of your ancestor (usually indicated by cause of death).

The recording and indexing of death certificates is done in the same way as births, with a record being kept locally by the superintendent registrar and one nationally at the GRO. A death would be recorded locally where it occurred, rather than on the actual residence of the deceased. Again, the GRO indexes are organized annually and then subdivided into quarters. Within these quarters the individuals are listed strictly alphabetically, surname first and then forename. From the March quarter of 1866 to the March quarter of 1969 an age of death for the deceased also appears. Hence there is no need to order the actual certificate if you only require this information (and if you are sure this is the correct ancestor, as with common names you may only be able to verify if it is the right person by obtaining the actual certificate). From June 1969 an age at death was replaced by the date of birth of the individual. As with birth and marriage certificates, the indexes were organized annually from 1984, and not further subdivided on a quarterly basis.

The actual certificate will give the following information:

• The exact registration district where the death was recorded.

• When and where died: The exact location of where the death occurred, which may not be where the deceased lived as he or she may have been visiting family or died in hospital.

• Name and surname: The full name of the deceased.

• Sex: Whether the deceased was male or female.

• Age: The age of the deceased; this is perhaps the most useful piece of information for those wishing to take their family tree further back in generations. Once you have an age it is possible to start searching for the individual’s birth certificate and parentage. Bear in mind, however, that this information would not always be accurate as no proof of age was required. Not everyone remembered their age with absolute certainty, especially those born prior to civil registration or in the early part of the nineteenth century.

• Occupation: A good genealogical clue in helping trace appropriate employment records if relevant. Women who were married or widowed would usually have the name and maybe occupation of their husband provided, which can be useful.

• Cause of death: The more modern records of death may give quite specialized medical terms that may need to be researched. The early certificates could be somewhat vaguer in the medical terms used. The cause and age of death are good indicators of the living conditions of the deceased, with poorer people generally having shorter life spans then the wealthier classes. Additionally, a sudden death or accident would often require a coroner’s inquest before the death certificate could be issued, and the date of the inquest should be stated on the certificate. These inquests may well have been reported in local newspapers and it is worth pursuing this line of enquiry. You may also be able to find the actual coroner’s report in your local record office. However, they are subject to data protection for 75 years and not every report would have survived, as there is no legal requirement to retain the information after 15 years have elapsed.

• Signature, description and residence of the informant: This can also be a useful piece of genealogical information as sometimes it would be family members who would register the deaths. However, after 1874 the law changed and it was compulsory to have a doctor’s certificate before a death certificate could be issued, and hence doctors would sometimes appear as the informants.

• When registered: The date the death was registered, the legal requirement being five days after the death of the person. However, if a coroner was involved, there may well be a considerable delay in registration.

• Signature of registrar: The signature of the local registrar.

CASE EXAMPLE

Death certificates

Whilst pursuing Bill Oddie’s family tree, his parents’ marriage certificate revealed that both their fathers had died by the time the couple married in 1938. This information was used to search for the death certificate (below, left) of Wilkinson Oddie, Bill’s grandfather. Starting with 1938, a search was made backwards in time, and an entry was found in 1927 for Wilkinson Oddie, aged 62, whose death was registered in the Oldham district. This important biographical information made it easy to look for his birth certificate, which was found in Rochdale in 1864. Given Bill’s father Harry was born in 1910, Wilkinson would have been 46 at the time of his son’s birth, which seemed quite old. Having found his birth and death certificate, a search was made for Wilkinson’s marriage certificate prior to 1910, which was found registered in Rochdale in 1907, to Emily Hawksworth. On the certificate, Wilkinson’s age was confirmed at 42 and his marital status was listed as widower. Clearly, further stories remained to be uncovered in Wilkinson’s background …

How to Locate and Order a Certificate

As mentioned above, information has been recorded at a local and a national level so there are two sources you’ll need to consider. The national indexes have been compiled and retained by the GRO, whilst there are also indexes to the certificates available locally. It is crucial to remember that the index entries in the local registers are not the same as the ones available at the GRO as each office would use their own indexing system.

Local Registration

The original certificates for each registration district are held at the superintendent registrar’s office. Each major city would have one of these offices and there would be numerous superintendent offices per county. However, due to some boundary changes throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries some of these offices may have been abolished and their records transferred to another office nearby. Each local register office is likely to have indexed the information by local district, year and then alphabetically (probably by first letter of surname only and not in strict alphabetical order). Hence in order to begin searching you will need to know the superintendent district and then the sub-district. The advantage of searching in the local registers is that it will be a quicker search to conduct, especially if the name you are looking for is relatively common. However, if you are not certain where the registration occurred, it is advisable to turn to the national GRO indexes.

National GRO Indexes

To order a duplicate certificate, you need to identify the relevant entry in the national indexes and note several pieces of information:

• The name of the individual (arranged in strict alphabetical order by surname)

• The name of the local district where the registration occurred

• The two-part numerical reference (the first being a code for the superintendent district and the second number a reference to the page where the certificate will be found)

Until October 2007, the national paper indexes were held at the Family Records Centre in Islington, London, before they were moved to Christchurch, Dorset; but they are no longer available for public inspection. Two projects are underway to create an online digital index service known as MAGPIE, linked to the Digitization of Vital Events (DoVE) project whereby the actual certificates would be made available as well. However, many commercial companies have created their own digital images and searchable databases of the GRO indexes – a topic that will be covered shortly – whilst the national GRO indexes have also been copied onto microfiche, and many local libraries and record offices hold copies. All duplicate certificates located on these national indexes have to be ordered online via the GRO website, www.gro.gov.uk, where you’ll also find details of how to complete the necessary forms and pay for the certificates and the expected length of time it will take to deliver.

‘Certificates give vital information about social status, place of residence and occupation.’

This is where you are likely to incur the most cost when building your family tree. At the time of going to press, each certificate will cost you £7 to purchase from the GRO, and takes a minimum of four days from receipt of order to dispatch of duplicate certificate. You can order a certificate on 24-hour turnaround, but these cost £23 so patience is probably a virtue! Despite these costs, you will need to order (where possible) a birth, marriage and death certificate for each direct ancestor, as the clues they contain will not only allow you to work back generation by generation but will also give you important information about their social status, place of residence and occupation.

Common Problems

Although it was a statutory obligation to register all births, marriages and deaths from 1 July 1837, you may well experience difficulties in finding an entry even though it should be included. There are numerous reasons behind this:

Late Registration

Often people would not register punctually. If you do not find an entry in the appropriate quarterly index, keep searching as it may well turn up later. A common mistake is to assume a marriage occurred at least nine months prior to a birth. This is by no means always the case, with people rushing to marry before a birth to avoid the stigma of having an illegitimate child.

Lack of Registration

Unfortunately, not every single event was registered. This was particularly the case in the early period of civil registration as some people treated the legal requirement to register with a degree of suspicion. Additionally, until the 1874 Act it was the responsibility of the local registrar to note down the event rather than that of each individual, and many people did not bother to report events to the registrar.

Some studies have estimated that as many as 15 per cent of births would not have been registered in the early years until the rules were changed from 1875, rising to as high as 33 per cent in some urban areas. Indeed, parents would attempt to hide the age of their children in order to send them to work as young as possible (child labour was being regulated by statute through various acts in the nineteenth century). Ignorance also played a part, as it was often not realized that registration was still required even if the child had been baptized, many people believing the church ceremony should be adequate. Hence, if the birth is not found, you should check the relevant parish records.

There are fewer gaps in the registration of marriages, although again it may be worthwhile consulting the local parish registers (see Chapter 7 for more information) to try and find a marriage this way, as some marriages in the early days of civil registration may have been recorded by the Church only. Additionally, some people lived as man and wife without actually ever marrying (legally it was the responsibility of those accusing the couple of having an ‘invalid’ marriage to prove it). This could be the case when people had separated but not formally divorced and remarriage was not an option.

The most complete set of registration certificates should be for deaths, but even some of these were missed in the early years of civil registration. Again it might be worthwhile searching for the burial in the appropriate parish, if known.

It is possible that the birth, marriage or death being searched for did not occur in England or Wales, and you may have to search in the Irish or Scottish records, discussed below. Alternatively, events may well have occurred overseas whilst a member of your family was on board a ship, serving in the armed forces or working in a colony in the British Empire. Information about looking for overseas civil registration is also discussed below.

‘An incorrect entry into the index is the most common reason for not finding an entry.’

Incorrect Index Entry

This is possibly the most common reason for not finding an entry, the mis-transcription by the clerk originally entering the information. Unfortunately, this was not so uncommon, especially in the earlier registers when everything was handwritten, making it difficult to read original certificates and therefore entering an index entry in the wrong place was an easy mistake to make. Certain letters are easily confused and this should be borne in mind when thinking of variant spellings:

• A capital handwritten B, P, D or even K can be easily confused

• It can be difficult to distinguish a ‘t’ from an ‘l’, an ‘m’ from an ‘n’ or an ‘e’ from an ‘i’ when handwritten

• As letters were often handwritten with large loops they could be easily misread and confused

• Some surnames have common variant spellings. For example ‘Matthews’ may be spelt ‘Mathews’, ‘Doherty’ as ‘Docherty’ or ‘Johnson’ as ‘Jonson’. Certain forenames may also have alternative spellings, such as ‘Sarah’ for ‘Sara’, ‘Conor’ for ‘Conner’ or ‘Coner’, or ‘Jane’ for ‘Jayne’.

Each step in the registration process could lead to a misspelling. Hence, by the time an entry has been placed in the national indexes the name could have altered a great deal. Thus if you have encountered a problem in the national indexes, try searching the local registers.

Another problem is that in the nineteenth century spellings were not necessarily uniform and some people spelt their names differently at various times. The relatively low level of literacy would also lead to inaccuracies as it would not be possible for people to ensure their names were spelt properly. In such circumstances the individual writing down the information would have to spell the name phonetically, which could lead to problems with uncommon surnames.

The last thing to remember is the use of nicknames, as information may be recorded either as the full correct name or as the more informal nickname. Hence, when looking for the birth of an ‘Anthony’, ‘James’ or ‘Nicholas’, remember to search for the shortened versions of these names – ‘Tony’, ‘Jim’ or ‘Nick’ – if you have no joy.

Online GRO Indexes

The growth of the Internet in the past 10 years has seen a huge growth of genealogical websites. Many commercial ventures have invested a large amount of time and money in digitizing many genealogical documents, including the GRO indexes and some local registers. It is now possible to search for your certificates online and, depending on which website you choose, many of these searches are also free of charge. Below is a list of some of the most useful online sources.

www.freebmd.org.uk

This is a free-to-view website run by volunteers who have been manually transcribing each single index entry in the GRO indexes. At the time of going to print the team has transcribed over 135 million records, with entries being relatively complete from 1837 to about 1915. It is an ongoing project and it is hoped that the whole period of civil registration will eventually be covered.

The main advantage of this site is that you can search for a particular name through a number of quarters all at once, rather than having to search through each quarter one by one. If you do find a relevant entry on the website it is advisable to double-check the entry with the original entry before ordering, in case of any transcription error.

www.ancestry.co.uk

This is the largest commercial genealogical website geared to the UK market currently on the Internet. Although many of its databases are only accessible upon payment, it is possible to search the GRO indexes online free of charge after registering your details on the website. Ancestry has scanned images of each page of the GRO indexes for every quarter, which means you need to search for an entry by going through each quarter at a time, as there is no single-name database or digital image of each individual entry.