One of the most frequent enquiries I get as a professional genealogist is about finding a birth which doesn’t seem to exist. If it’s a birth which took place from July 1837 it ought to have been registered and appear in the GRO indexes. Even recent ones can seem to be missing for no apparent reason. This post looks at the reasons why a birth might not be found initially and how to go about locating that elusive birth entry. My approach is that it must be there somewhere, it’s just hiding!
The reasons for not finding it fall into a number of categories so let’s look at each in turn.
It’s not the right name
This could be as simple as a mistake by the registrar recording the birth or a copying error later on or it could be that it was registered under a variant of the name. With a name like mine, looking for variants becomes second nature: I’ve come across obvious variants such as Melia and Malia but also some less obvious ones such as Maleah, Mealey and Malley as well as any of those variants with an O’ in front as it’s an Irish name! Surname spellings often settled much later than we think: my great-grandfather and his brother used different spellings of the name for their children in the 1880s which resulted in different branches of the family having different names today. One way to get round this is to use phonetic searches when searching in online databases or to use wildcards (*) which represent any letter and any number of letters e.g. *M*l*a* will find Mealia, O’Mealia, Melia, Meliah etc.
They may have been registered with a different name for other reasons though. A child who was born before their parents married may have been registered under their mother’s maiden name. If you don’t know their mother’s maiden name (and without a birth, it’s likely you won’t), looking for the births of younger siblings can be useful. Using names of siblings from the census records to search the GRO indexes can help reveal the mother’s maiden name as it is given in the indexes. A search can then be carried out for a birth under the mother’s name. This is surprisingly common and in my own family a relative born in 1885 was shocked to find in 1920 that her birth certificate was in her mother’s maiden name and her parents didn’t marry until two years after her birth.
And it’s not always the surname that causes the problems: great-aunt Polly may have been registered as Mary Ann and Peggy may have been Margaret, Rose may have been Roseanna and great-uncle Fred may have been registered as Fred, Frederick or even Alfred. People are sometimes known by their middle name so don’t ignore a likely looking match if the name you’re looking for is a middle name rather than a first name. If you search by surname without a first name then something may pop up that looks right: first names can also be spelled wrongly on occasion.
Sometimes a birth was registered without a first name so it’s always worth looking for entries with no first name.
It’s not the right date
Ages aren’t always accurate on censuses either through vanity or because the person providing the information didn’t know how old the person was. Sometimes people only age by 8 or 9 years between censuses, deducting a year or two from their age. A friend whose grandmother died a few years ago was surprised to find she was actually two years older than she had said during her life, they had even celebrated her 90th birthday in the wrong year!
Census information was provided by the head of household sometimes verbally to the enumerator if they were illiterate and that information could be recorded wrongly. In addition, some people in the 19th century weren’t sure when they were born.
Remember that the census gives age so someone may appear to be a year younger if they hadn’t had their birthday that year. It’s always worth searching two years each side of the year you think someone was born and perhaps more if the ages vary considerably between censuses.
It’s not the right place
Sometimes a family believes that someone was born in a particular place because of stories passed down. Until I started researching my family many years ago I thought my grandfather was born in Co. Mayo, Ireland but in fact he was born in Leeds! Census records can be misleading especially if someone wasn’t sure where they were born or they moved not long after they were born or their parents died when they were young and didn’t tell them where they were born. Often a whole family would be given the same place of birth on the census because of a mistake by the enumerator or could be recorded as born in the place they were currently living. Checking all the available censuses helps spot any differences.
If you’ve tried everything: variant spellings, a wide age range, a cross country search and a lot of lateral thinking, it may be that they just weren’t registered. I hate to admit defeat but there was always a small proportion of births that weren’t registered especially before 1865. My own great-grandmother’s birth in 1864 wasn’t registered. Her parents married eight years after she was born and although some of her siblings were registered under their mother’s maiden name of Connor, Elizabeth wasn’t registered under the name she used, Adkin, or under her mother’s maiden name. It was just one of those, thankfully rare, births that slipped through the net.
One way round this is to look for a baptism if it’s available though not everyone was baptised. It doesn’t give you as much information as you get from a birth certificate but it does, at least, confirm that they exist! This is where I found my great-grandmother and discovered that she was born on 2 January 1864 and was baptised 10 years later.
Good luck hunting!