Searching the Birth Indexes

Tracing Ancestors in the UK - Beginners Section 3 - Civil Registration
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Transcript

Okay, so here we are on the homepage of ancestry.co.uk. This is the site I use most of all. It's not perfect, but it is very good for searching the major documents that you need for your basic ancestry. You can take out a free trial, which lasts for 14 days. So I do recommend that you go ahead and do that as soon as possible if you haven't done so already. There are other sites where you can search for several registration and parish registers and census records.

That as I use this one, and you know, I'm sort of you're sort of following along with me, I do suggest that you use ancestry to start with and you can always try it out the other website. and see which one works best for you at a later date. But we're going to start with AdSense straight and and this is the homepage, you can customize your homepage to show it, you know what, what you want to show. At the top, you get the links to the sort of main records. And at the bottom, it's more personalized with links back to records that you have saved for one reason or another. So we are going to start by looking for a birth registration in the civil registration indexes.

So we want to start by going to birth marriage and death records and you can go back to one of the major records so you can either go from there or you can go to the search menu at the top and click on birth, marriage and death. Now as you might notice, it says there also perish. So if you did a search from this page, ancestry would search not only the several registration indexes, but the parish register indexes too. That's fine. Just as you're starting, I would suggest that you get much more specific because if you've got a fairly common name, you might get up to many results. And it can be confusing to start with.

I'll show you later when you're looking for a marriage that because they're the parish register marriage and the marriage certificate are the same, it doesn't really matter. But for now, we're going to get really specific and go to civil registration. And as you can see here, this is birth marriage and death from 1837. So we know that's a civil registration index. Okay, so let's just wait for that to come up properly. And here Is the search form.

So, I'm going to start by looking for a post 1912 birth, as I said, Now the reason for this from 1912 in the indexes, the mother's maiden name was also given. So if you happen to know the mother's maiden name, then you can use that as part of the search criteria. And that's extremely useful, particularly if you have a fairly common name to narrow it down and make sure you've got the right person. So let's have a go and just see how that works. So I'm going to look for the birth of my mother and she was born in 1924. So let's put in Joyce's her first name and then her last name her name she was born with was manly.

So we put that in. Now you can. If you're absolutely sure about the names or any information, you can click on this to say exact, but I would be very careful on using that too much because often because of spelling errors as I have explained before, if the name has been spelled wrong in the indexes and you've clicked on that, then it's not going to come up. So I suggest to start with that you leave that open. Take that down. And you can always narrow it down if you're having problems later.

You can use these to narrow your results down a lot. Now, so we're going to go to we want to birth so we want to go to this line. Now because the in the index is the exact birth date will not be given. You don't want to fill in day and month even if you know those Because the the indexes will only come up with the year in the quarter in which the birth was registered. So we're going to put in the year, which is 1924. Now because I know for absolute fact, my mother was born in 1924, I am going to put except there, but if you're not absolutely Sure you can.

With these dates, you can put in a year to five or 10 years, either way, so that's quite useful. My mother was born in Manchester. Gonna put that in and that ancestry will bring up several places which match what you're putting in so you don't have to put in the whole thing can usually find on the drop down list there. That's Manchester in Lancashire. I think we're setting is it's not always a good idea to click on. Exact because it depends on sort of which parish I was in if it was part of Lancashire part of the outer suburbs of Manchester, it may not come up as Manchester probably see what I mean in a minute.

So I'm just going to leave that open. Now then because I know that my mother's mother's maiden name was read, I'm going to put that in, but I won't click on exact again because of possible spelling, differentiation there. Okay, so if we go down, there are a few other things you can put in but I generally leave that empty there's nothing much you need to put in there. Usually keywords more useful for census records when you might know an occupation or something like that. Not really necessary to put in gender mostly So we are going to then click on search to see what comes up. So here we go.

Now what ancestry does, it gives you the nearest matches to what you have put in. And because I haven't put in exact, so Manchester then it's also giving me other places, not only in Lancashire, but in other counties as well. And as you can see, there's only three actual choice man is born in that year. And the rest are obviously not my mobile. So I'd sort of look at this one. First of all, if you just hover over that, it'll come up with the transcript of the index entry.

And as you can see here, the mother's maiden name is Read. So that looks very possible. I might have a quick look at that. But no as you can see the mother's name maiden name here is completely different. So I know that's not the one. And I know my mother wasn't born in Devon.

So we click on that. And this is definitely the right one from my mother. So what I would do next if I wanted to order my mother's birth certificate is not go to this where it says order birth certificate, I do recommend that you do not use the ancestry service here because it actually costs quite a bit more than ordering it directly from the general register office and I'm going to show you how to do that later on. So so ignore that. But what you do need to do is taken note of all these details because you will need those details. When you Order the certificate.

So you don't see the certificate online, you have to order it. So you need to make sure you've got the name the year, the registration district, mother's maiden name, particularly these two numbers here, the volume number and the page number. Okay, so now we're going to have a look. Having done that, and we're going to have another look for birth registration before 1912. And we'll see how that makes it just a little bit trickier. So in this case, we're going to look for my maternal grandmother's birth.

She was Elizabeth breed. Now again, Elizabeth, names like Elizabeth can be spell you they can come up with all kinds of different names. Elizabeth can be a lizer. Or even better, yeah, I have come across as a name that somebody was actually Christian with, for Elizabeth or it can be in their various names. So we're going to leave that open. And of course, again, because of possible spelling variations, we'll leave that open.

Now, I know she was born. When I was first looking, I knew it was sort of around about 1892 83. So we've got to look at 92. And then I can put, let's say, two years either way. And that means because Elizabeth read, fairly common name, I think that name is going to come up quite a lot in the results, we want to try and narrow the results down as much as possible. So because I sort of know she was born around that time, I can look at Two years either way, that gives a four year range.

Now I know she also was born in Manchester. So again, we're gonna put Manchester and leave that open. Now in this case, although you have the options to put the names down here, there wouldn't be any point in putting any names down here because the parents names do not come up on the indexes. So leave those open. And we'll just do a search for this and see what comes up. So as you can see, and as I said, in the spelling lecture I gave before there are three different spellings in the in the first three results and quite a lot of Elizabeth reads in Lancashire Missing say that there lies are there that's a possibility.

So you can see there is also a little bit more confusing than the other one. So let's have a look at this. Though Elizabeth read 1894 just seems a little bit late for me. There's a another 1894 as Elizabeth Jane, I don't think she had a middle name. And there's a Liverpool No, definitely not Liverpool. So if I was looking to start with these results could be a little bit confusing.

I could very easily be looking at maybe ordering one of these certificates and I'd probably find it was the wrong one. So come down a bit further. There's this one in Charleston. Now Remember, with big cities or it's much easier when you get smaller town registration districts and you're into villages but with big cities sometimes not so easy to realize where where people were and on ancestry journeys, very useful thing where you can view the parishes within a particular registration district. So because I know you know, maybe I've looked at the census records and seeing where my grandmother was living, I could then click on here, go and see which parishes are in this registration District, which is all sort of within the greater area of Manchester and we can see that the registration of district of Charlton includes all these parishes. If I looked on the census record, I know that my grandmother was born in home So I think that actually looks like it's the right one.

So we'll go back. And then we take down the essential details here the name, date registration district and the volume and page number before going over to the general register office and ordering that. So you can see, it's not always absolutely straightforward and it's very important to realize that you're looking for registration districts, not the exact place of birth. So you need to, you know, just bear these things in mind. So that's that for the birth and next we're going to have a look at a marriage search.

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