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England and Wales
Civil Registration
From 1 July 1837 the state took on responsibility for the registration of all births, marriages and deaths in England nd Wales. Civil registration began in Scotland on 1 January 1855 and in Ireland on 1 January 1864.
The indexes for those events registered in England and Wales are kept at the General Register Office.
Click on the links below and in the side panel to the left to discover more information to guide your research:
England & Wales: General Register Office
Official information on Births, Adoptions, Marriages, Civil Partnerships and Deaths. Enables searches on birth and death indexes and offers copies of registrations in varied formats: certificates, PDFs and Multilingual Standard Forms.
England & Wales: Local Government Register Offices
Local government register offices in England and Wales also hold records of events registered in their area.
Census Records: England & Wales
Census Records for England and Wales, from 1841 to 1921, are held at the National Archives at Kew where it is possible to view original documents or online copies which are available on NA partner sites, Ancestry and FindMyPast. All later censuses remain in the custody of the Office for National Statistics and will remain closed to the public for 100 years after the date they were conducted. Many census records have been transcribed by our volunteers and are available to search and view on our website.
Freecen: UK 19th Century Census Returns
FreeCEN provides free internet searches of 19th century UK census returns. The first UK census to include names and other details of UK residents took place in 1841. Since then, a census has been held every ten years. Includes returns for Scotland and Ireland.
Links to websites offering online transcriptions of UK Births, Marriages, Deaths and Censuses. A wide range of other indexes and transcriptions are available for most counties and sometimes include parish records, wills and monumental inscriptions.
An ongoing transcription project of the Civil Registration Index of births, marriages and deaths for England and Wales.
The UK National Archives: What We Have
Official archive and publisher for the UK Government, based at Kew, London: over 1,000 years of information including documents from the Home Office, Foreign Office and Central Criminal Court. Also holds Census and Naturalistion certificates.
The UK National Archives: Events
A programme of online, free to access events delivered by specialists: Talks, Top Level Tips and Meet the Author events.
National Archives: Discovery Catalogue
A searchable catalogue at The National Archives at Kew. (A search for Italy or Italians finds over 10,000 records).
An Official Public Record: several legal notices are required by law to be published in the UK’s official newspapers of record. The site includes naturalisations and digitised issues for both world wars.
Non-Conformist and Non-Parochial BMDs
For records of Birth, Baptism, Marriage, Death and Burial taken from non-parish sources: non-conformist, early births, baptisms and burials, overseas records.
A fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London's central criminal court.
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