A civil registration scheme for Deaths was introduced into England and Wales on 1 July 1837. From this date, all deaths had to be reported within 42 days by 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. Compliance was good because from 1837 onwards, burial was only permitted upon the production of a death certificate.
Death Certificate of Elizabeth BRIMER née SADLER 1914 (Family B). Crown Copyright.
A death registration record will show::
- date and place of death.
- name of the deceased.
- the sex of the deceased.
- the age of the deceased.
- possibly the name of the father, if the deceased was a child or sometimes an unmarried woman.
- possibly the name of the husband in the case of a married or widowed woman
- the signature and address of the informant, which may be a relative of the deceased.
It should be noted that a doctor’s certificate was not required to register a death before 1875 and so cause of death before this time may be non-specific such as ‘old age’ or non-medical such as ‘act of God’. It also meant a death could be registered without a body, allowing insurance claims for people who were still living or never existed in the first place to be collected. There was also the possibility of murders being covered up and undiscovered. From 1875 a doctor’s certificate became a requirement to register a death, closing these loopholes and enabling more reliable statistics into the causes of death to be gathered
It is only possible to view the indexes for death 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, https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk and http://ancestry.co.uk. Recently, however the General Record Office has produced a new transcription of the index, which includes age at death, allowing certificates to be ordered with a higher degree of confidence and people to be placed into their correct families without the need to order the certificate. It is important to note that the ages given are meant to be in years but some have been given in months with no indication that this is the case. Therefore, it is important for all ages of 23 or less to consider the possibility that this may refer to either months or years and look for other corroborating evidence. Each certificate ordered currently costs £9.25.
The tables below are based on the death 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.
Brimer-Brymer database last updated at 2016-07-02 00:29:43 with 4028 census records and 2856 individuals