Firstly, Happy New Year to you all! I hope you had a marvellous Christmas break, and I wish you success in your own family history endeavours this year!

2022 held many distractions for me, and I didn’t manage to post here, although that doesn’t mean I wasn’t working on my family tree research. We took another trip to Northern Ireland and visited some significant areas in County Down (post coming soon), and I’ve also been working on my Ancestry family tree.

I’m starting 2023 as I mean to go on, by following up on some conundrums, including being unable to locate my own birth record on Ancestry or even on the England and Wales registration birth index.

I looked up the current rules for registering births in the UK: the Gov.UK site states that:

“All births in England, Wales and Northern Ireland must be registered within 42 days of the child being born.”

This has been the law since the passing of the Births and Deaths Act 1874, which states that if more than 42 days but less than three months have passed since the birth, the superintendent registrar had to be present, and if between three months and a year, the registration could only be authorised by the Registrar General.

Why does this matter? I have a hard copy of my birth certificate, and even if I didn’t, I could order a copy from the public records office, as I’ve done for other relatives for my family history endeavours. It occurred to me recently to double-check my birth certificate; maybe I had one detail wrong, although that seemed unlikely; I knew my name, date and place of birth and who registered the birth (my father).

I decided to check it again for any clues; my last search on Ancestry.co.uk, which had a range of +/- 5 years, brought up no registered record of my birth.

And there it was, something I’d never previously noticed.

My birth was registered by declaration, by authority of the Registrar General, nearly seven years after I was born! The registration date of September makes me think this might have been related to the start of the school year; perhaps my birth certificate was required for proof of identification.

I searched again for my birth, this time with a margin of +/- ten years, and the record popped up right away, under registration quarter July-September 1974. Clicking on the record, the Civil Registration shows me as being born in Q3 1974. There was no handwritten note or update for my record, so according to the records, I am 49 years old!

The moral of this small personal tale is, if you’re having no luck finding a birth/marriage/death record online, try widening the date parameters, even if you’re certain of the details; my mistake was relying on my hard copy birth certificate and not checking the qualifier. If you don’t have a hard copy document, it’s even more prudent to search a wider range of dates and similar names, just in case there was a delay in registration, as there was (for some reason) for me!

Sources

Register a Birth in England, Wales and Northern Ireland –
https://www.gov.uk/register-birth