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There are general rules you can follow when searching for the births, baptisms, marriages, deaths and burials of ancestors you have never known even if you only have a rough idea of when they were alive:

1. If you start from the last known birth on your tree for which you have a birth certificate, say your grandmother’s birth certificate dated 1917 for example, this should give you her parents’ names. You can then search for a marriage under their names back from 1917. You may have to work back as much as twenty years to 1897 if your grandmother was the youngest of a large generation of children, but once you have found your great-grandparents’ marriage in the indexes you can order the certificate to find out their ages, which will enable you to then search for their birth certificates over a range of a few years.

2. Some marriage certificates do not give exact ages and will state ‘full age’ instead, meaning a person was over 21 years old, or will say ‘minor’ if they were less than 21 years old. Where this is the case you can search for that person’s birth date starting from around 16 years prior to the date on their marriage certificate and working back perhaps as many as 20 more years, if they married late in life. Starting a birth search 16 years prior to a marriage date also works well when searching parish registers, which rarely give ages.

3. If you are keen to find out when an ancestor died, the only way to do this from death and burial indexes is to establish the last known time they were alive and work forward from then. Perhaps your grandmother was a witness on her daughter’s marriage certificate in 1965, in which case you can conduct a search for your grandmother’s death from 1965 onwards. If you are looking for the death of a person who was born over 100 years ago, you would usually only need to search up until they would have been 100 years old. It is important to conduct a search for the longest period of time over which an event was likely to have occurred, particularly if you are looking for somebody with a common name.

4. When searching the birth, marriage and death indexes you will often come across more than one possible match, and the only way to find out which one is correct is to order the certificates for the most likely options and compare them against other information you have gathered for that person. If you are confident that you have conducted a thorough search of the indexes, then you will know that you have not missed anything.

As mentioned above, it was the duty of the local superintendent registrar to forward the information to the Registrar General in London. Therefore there are two sets of records: the original records held at the local registrar’s office and the copies held by the Registrar General. Once the records arrived at the Registrar General’s office in London, clerks would reorganize them. They made alphabetical indexes for the certificates, broken down on a quarterly basis. Currently, the general public has no legal right to view the original certificates held locally but only the copies held by the Registrar General, though you can order duplicate copies of the original records from local register offices. The records of the Registrar General for England and Wales are now in the General Register Office (GRO), which is a department of the Office of National Statistics, and duplicates can also be ordered online at www.gro.gov.uk. Separate arrangements exist for Scotland and Ireland, and are discussed later in this chapter.