Birth records represent the first element of that essential research triumvirate – births, marriages and deaths – a group of records so important to what we do that they’ve earned the right to be referred to by their initials: BMDs.
But what do we actually mean when we talk about birth records? After all, many of the records that we routinely use in the course of our research provide us with information about our ancestors’ births. Census returns, for example, tell us where they were born and (approximately) when; military service records might give us similar details and we can even get useful information about their origins from records relating to their deaths, in the shape of burial registers, monumental inscriptions and newspaper obituaries.
Official records
In this article, however, I want to consider records where the principal aim is to provide an official record of someone’s birth. In England & Wales this means the baptismal registers created by the established church from 1538 onwards and the civil birth records, which have been the responsibility of the General Register Office since 1 July 1837.
Introducing parish registers
Parish registers were introduced towards the end of the turbulent reign of King Henry VIII by his Chief Minister, Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell’s ‘Order for
