A civil registration scheme for Births was introduced into England and Wales on 1 July 1837. From this date, all births had to be reported within 42 days by one of the parents or a “qualified informant” to a local registrar. They in turn reported them to the superintendent registrar of the registration district. The superintendent registrar retained his own records but copied them, every three months, to the Registrar General. Late registration resulted in a fine and this sometimes led to parents altering the date of birth to within the time limit.
Birth Certificate of Margaret BRIMER 1848 (Family I). Crown Copyright.
The format for birth registration remained unchanged from 1837-1969. The birth record showed the following:
- date and place of birth.
- time of birth – usually only for multiple births, although occasionally some registrars recorded this information for all births.
- the sex of the child.
- name if the parents had chosen one – the names could be added at a later date if they had not been decided at the time of registration, but as this involved a further fee it was rarely done.
- names of both parents, if they were a married couple, together with the mothers maiden name and any previous married names.
- name of just the mother in the case of an illegitimate birth, unless the father attended the registration.
- the father’s occupation
- the signature and address of the informant.
It is only possible to view the indexes for birth registrations online at the moment. These are available at free sites such as http://www.freebmd.org.uk/ and subscription sites such as http://www.findmypast.co.uk and http://ancestry.co.uk. Recently, however the General Record Office has produced a new transcription of the index, which includes the mothers maiden name, allowing certificates to be ordered with a higher degree of confidence and children with less common surnames to be placed into their correct families without the need to order the certificate. Each certificate ordered currently costs £11.00. PDF copies of certificates are available for the years 1837-1918 at a cost of £7.00 but cannot be used for evidential purposes.
The tables below are based on the birth registration indexes. Brimer and Brymer surnames have been fully researched and put into families and are colour coded accordingly. The data has been collected for the other families, but not synthesised or analysed yet. The tables are presented in their raw form and will be updated in the future.
Analysis of these results can be seen on these pages:
BRIMER Births England and Wales 1837-2005 Analysis
Brimer-Brymer database last updated at 2016-07-02 00:29:43 with 4028 census records and 2856 individuals