Birth / death certificates

[way2serious]

I have just started looking into my family history and need copies of several birth and death certificates to access information, including military records. Is there a cheaper way of doing this rather than paying £16 for each one?

Gro.gov is 12.50 per cert for birth, marriage and death. Not sure about military info, think that has to come from sites with annual membership like ancestry.co.uk or find my past.

Are they English castigates, Scottish certs or elsewhere?

Older Scottish certificates can be downloaded from scotlands people but not in a way that's useable for official purposes. Just for info.

English certificates generally need to be bought. Though if it's just for info from the cert some areas now have good digitised records on ancestry (Norfolk and parts of Manchester are two) but again it's just the books so not able to be used for official purposes.

Are you looking for recent military records hence needing the certs?

There are a lot of WW1 and WW2 records on the likes of ancestry

Find My Past is the other big family history site, with lots of military records. Forces War Records is a (paid for) military records site. They all offer a free trial leriod.

Lives of the First World War and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission sites are free and are useful starting points.

If you look at the GRO website, you can get a lot of older BMD certificates as PDFs. That's the cheapest way to get them, when available.

NEVER get them through a third party website (ancestry etc); the GRO website is always the cheapest, no matter what.

Having said that, many baptism records (from the church, not the same as a birth certificate) and marriage certificates have been digitised and are available to view through one or more of the large FH websites. If the majority of your family comes from a particular county, it would be worth looking to see if that county is covered by one website or the other (eg many Leicestershire church records are digitised onto FindMyPast; Nottinghamshire ones are on Ancestry). You may find that specific areas are represented online with records added by volunteers - I've found records from some W Midland churches like this, or there are websites such as Sheffield Indexers. I'm sure there will be lots of others spread around the country.

FMP and ancestry often have free trials over bank holiday weekends so you could wait and see if that happens in August and have a concentrated 48 hours of searching for free! Or don't forget that many local libraries, and virtually all local archive offices, will have computers which you can use to search genealogical websites for free.

I'd also suggest joining Rootschat, if you haven't already. It's free and there are contributors there who are very knowledgable about a wealth of different topics. I've had some really helpful tips from the Armed Forces board there.

https://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/certificates/login.asp

www.rootschat.com

Thanks everyone. Yes the birth and death certificates and military records are relatively new ones so not available on PDF etc. As I said I am just starting out. I am looking at trialling Ancestry and FMP but hadn’t heard of Rootschat so will also explore that.

Do you need an official registry copy of the death/birth certs or do you just need the key pieces of information? If the latter, you can get a digital image of the entry for £3 per time from the GRO (this has all the core details but wouldn’t work as a legal copy). This is very useful if eg you have several candidate entries but are not sure who is the correct person or if you have a lot to chase down but don’t need the full cert.

I’d second looking out for “free” periods on Ancestry. Military records are often expanded free of charge over eg remembrance weekends, other events also bring free access to extended records sets. You can also switch your membership up and down month by month or drop to free membership during fallow times without losing access to the tree/data you have already saved.

I have also found local archives very helpful with well organised services for images of eg burial records for a few pounds and volunteers who photograph graves and will add records on request. Grave/burial entries can be very useful for extra info.

Military records are often expanded free of charge over eg remembrance weekends, other events also bring free access to extended records sets.

VJ Day coming up....

Local newspapers sometimes reported on local lads who were killed or wounded, sometimes with a photograph. I was once researching someone from Northampton who was killed in the battle of Neuve Chapelle in 1915. (The Northamptonshires took heavy casualties.) The Northampton paper gave me some biographical details and a photo, the CWGC site told me where he was buried.

Local newspapers are available on Find My Past (keep an eye out for free weekends), or you can subscribe directly to the British Library Newspapers site.

@C8H10N4O2 I do need a copy of my dad’s death certificate to get full access to his service records I believe. I was estranged from my dad for many years ( from when he left when I was a child) so have limited knowledge of his details and family.

Thanks again for all the tips. Will definitely be opting in and out of subscriptions depending upon the the time etc I have each month and looking for offers etc.

"If the latter, you can get a digital image of the entry for £3 per time from the GRO (this has all the core details but wouldn’t work as a legal copy)."

I agree, I use this quite often.

However, just to warn people, digital images of birth certificates are only available for births up until 1923 and deaths up until 1957.

After those dates you have to pay for a certificate.

@Another2Cats Yes I am currently paying for birth and death certificates dated after those years and wondered if there was a cheaper way of getting them.

Where are you getting them from, @way2serious ? The GRO website charges £12.50 for a copy certificate, so a little cheaper than you mentioned initially.

@mauvishagain The GRO website but you have to pay extra if you don’t know the reference number? So it come to £16 each.

ita maybe worth making an appointment at the local registry office. I was doing a bit of research and I’d ordered two death certificates and when I’d gone to collect them the very helpful lady looked up various others and let me take notes (date of birth, death, cause etc.) of quite a few other relatives whilst I was there.

There are many people here with Ancestry and/or FindMyPast and/or MyHeritage subscriptions.

I'm sure if you were to make a request then somebody would be happy to take the couple of minutes it would take to find the required details and send it to you via a DM.

I am a registrar.

The original entries are always held where the event happened. GRO stands for General Register Office (our head office) and they also hold a copy, but the original entries are held locally in the register office.

If your relative was born in Birmingham, got married in Wakefield, died in Liverpool, you would apply to Birmingham for the birth certificate, Wakefield for the marriage certificate and Liverpool for the death certificate, paying a statutory fee of £12.50 for a ten day working service for each.

Or apply to GRO, although as you said, that costs more if you don’t know the entry number.

Please don’t expect to be able to make an appointment or be given any extra information though from a local register office. That is incredibly unusual and must be an extremely quiet register office 🤣 Where I work, we have hundreds and hundreds of certificate orders a week and they need to be ordered online. If we can’t find the entry, we suggest Find My Past or Ancestry. We’ll sometimes use the free version of Find My Past quickly for them, if the applicant has given confusing info, just to help them out a bit though.

Thanks again for your helpful suggestions.

It sounds as though you need to know how to find the reference number!

Do you use FreeBMD? Or know how to search on the GRO site?

As suggested, I think you'd benefit from joining Rootschat; people there will talk you through queries like this in no time!

@mauvishagain Thanks.

Stupid question of the day - how do you find the reference number?

From the GRO site Research your family history using the General Register Office - GOV.UK:

Find index reference numbers online
You can:

• search the GRO online Index of historic births (1837 to 1916) and deaths (1837 to 1957)
• view index reference numbers for free on the FreeBMD website

It's not a stupid question at all.

There is a part of the GRO website where you can search the indexes to find that information and order the certificate directly from them. It is here:

https://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/certificates/indexessearch.asp

You start off by choosing birth or death.

Working through an example of looking for a death. Once you click on death it will then ask you what year it was registered and you can also include a range eg +/- 2 years.

You can then enter the surname and sex of the person you are looking for. It helps to enter more information, like their first name, as well to help narrow down the results.

It also has an option to include similar names just in case you're not sure of the exact spelling.

You then hit search and it will come back with all the entries that match.

For example, I was once looking for the death certificate of a woman by the name of Muriel Hubbard who died in 2019.

So I put those details into the search and it came back with three different Muriel Hubbard's that died that year. It gives the quarter they died in, the place they died and also their year of birth along with the reference information that is needed.

I happened to know where in the country the Muriel I was looking for died and I also knew her date of birth so I could identify which one of the three Muriels it was that I was looking for.

From there you click on whichever is the right person and it comes up with the options for ordering, which are Certificate, PDF and Digital Image (although for newer records you only get the choice of Certificate.

When you then click on Certificate (or one of the other choices) it then takes you to a page where you can order the certificate for £12.50 and all the information is pre-filled.

It's a similar process for looking for a birth certificate, except, you will also have the option to include the mother's maiden surname as well.

As @Another2Cats says, not a stupid q at all! I've been doing this stuff for many years but none of us knows how best to use the specialist websites at first! Let us know if you need any more help 😀

@Another2Cats thank you for your explanation. I will definitely follow the steps you have outlined for my next certificate.

@mauvishagain thank you for your support. I will almost definitely be back with more questions!!