Missing Births

June5623

Hi everyone, hope you are all well out there. I cannot find three births anywhere. They were in 1836, 1838 and 1841. Surely they would have been registered. The births supposedly took place in Birmingham Warwickshire. Anyone have any ideas please?

Adrian Bruce1

Just for clarity, I am assuming that the only Birmingham, Warwickshire is in England 😉

@June5623 - civil registration of births (marriages and deaths) started in England in mid 1837, so your 1836 birth (assuming the date to be accurate) wouldn't have been registered.

As for the 2 later ones, it's a bit pot luck in those earlier years, especially in a big city. The onus was on the registrar to record the births, not on the parents. Hence, if the registrar didn't get a tip off, there was every chance that the birth would not be recorded.

The children of my 3G grandparents are instructive.

My 2G GF appeared not to be registered until I eventually twigged that although his surname in later life was Bates, he'd been registered as Bate without the "s" - not an error but the original spelling in mid Cheshire.

However, I came to the conclusion that two of his older siblings genuinely hadn't been registered. They lived on the border between 2 registration districts, in a scattered settlement, so I think that the relevant registrar simply didn't get to know about those 2 births. On the other hand, other nearby relatives lived in a compact village so there was every chance that a local midwife or parish priest might have known about those births and informed the registrar.

So yes, you might be missing those two births because the names, dates or localities weren't as you expected. But the registrar simply might not have found out about the births.

Paul W

@June5623

Unfortunately, you will not find any registered birth record for the 1836 event, as civil registrations in England & Wales only came into effect on 1 July 1837. Even from then, registration only become compulsory from 1875, so there are likely to be many births that you will not find on the "main" websites used to carry out such searches: GRO and FreeBMD.

That said, the 1838 and 1841 births could be recorded there, but are perhaps proving difficult to find for one of a couple of reasons. Firstly, they might not have been registered at Birmingham itself. Secondly, the spelling of the surnames might not be as you would expect.

In any further search, I would broaden your search criteria to cover the whole of Warwickshire (possibly the whole of England, especially with a less common name). I would also use wildcards in my search to capture similarly spelled names. For example, many of my LAUDER relatives have ben indexed as LANDER, due to the similarity of appearance in the "n" and "u" in certain cursive writing. Knowing this, I usually search with LA*DER inputted to the surname field.

I assume you have also tried searching (at FamilySearch or elsewhere) for the baptisms of these individuals. However, again not every child was baptised and those who were are sometimes difficult to find, especially if their parents were non-conformists and might have had their children baptised in a small, non-Anglican chapel, or even much later in life.

It might help if you could share the actual names with us, as this might provide a clue as to whether they can be found using a certain "search strategy" that might not immediately come to mind.