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Some of the most important sources for any family historian are the records generated by civil registration – birth, marriage and death certificates. They are, essentially, the ‘building blocks’ for any family tree and can be used to verify initial information gathered from your relatives, or extend your family tree further back in time. This chapter explains what these sources are, where you can find them, how you can order them and various ways you can extract relevant information to help with your research.

The journey from cradle to grave has been officially recorded by the state since the nineteenth century, when the civil registration of births, marriages and deaths was first introduced. The government passed legislation making it mandatory to register the birth of every child, the marriage of each couple and the death of every person from 1 July 1837 in England and Wales, with the subsequent issue of paperwork – birth, marriage and death certificates. Similar legislation enforcing the same was enacted in Scotland from 1 January 1855 and in Ireland from 1864 onwards (although Protestant marriages in Ireland had been registered since 1845). These monumental changes to everyday life came about through the government’s desire to monitor population trends more effectively, following a Parliamentary Report in 1836. Previously, the established Church of England had collected some of this information through its parish registers – a subject tackled in Chapter 7. However, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, penalties against non-conformist religious bodies were relaxed, which led to a growth in these movements, and the number of people whose journey through life was not recorded by the Church of England increased dramatically. Therefore by the beginning of the nineteenth century the information held by the established Church could no longer be deemed accurate, and so a parliamentary committee was set up to investigate the problem.

The introduction of a centralized system whereby birth, marriage and death certificates were generated is crucially important for anyone wishing to research their family tree, as it is possible to obtain copies of every certificate issued going back to the earliest records in 1837. Each type of certificate will give different clues, depending on which one is viewed, and this chapter explains how the system worked; what each certificate contains, and how you can obtain copies for your ancestors; common problems in tracking down certificates; what material is available online; and a summary of civil registration in Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

‘Birth, marriage and death certificates are crucially important for anyone wishing to research their ancestors.’