How do I find a year of birth when I have just the birthday and married name please?

[FABIsInTraining]

I never know where to start with things like this and appreciate any ideas. TIA.

Are you tracing some kind of ancestry? Do you know where the marriage took place? Can you get the records where the marriage took place to get some further information?

It is someone I have known for 30 years and I am just being nosey curious as to when they were born. They have been married for approximately 55 years. No idea where they were married other than an assumption it was near where they live now.

I think people usually work backwards from the marriage certificate, as that will have d.o.b and info about parents.

You can sometimes work out when the marriage would have been by starting about a year before the birth of the oldest child, if you know that.

I don't know that either but thank you.

Can you not ask them?

I could but we don't talk that often and it would seem ridiculous after all this time.

Assuming I had a good reason for doing it myself rather than just asking I would start by doing an Ancestry marriage search for [her first name] [blank surname] with spouse's surname [their married surname], and hoping that there weren't too many results. If you know husband's first name that would help to narrow it down.

That will give you one or more possibilities with maiden surnames, then you can do a birth search for [her first name] [her (potential) maiden surname] and a very vague span of dates (e.g. you'd expect her to have been born somewhere between 1909 and 1939).

Can you steer a conversation around to things that were happening when you were born? Something like "Oh I don't remember the moon landings because I was only 6 weeks old" or something like that?

I'm not sure how much you can dig up about living people - i was sort of assuming you were looking for family hostory, and the individuals would all be dead - that makes a difference in what info is available ot the public.

If it's an unusual first/last name combination it's easy enough to do for anyone born before 2005, if births and marriages took place in England and Wales (or in Scotland, although the only register search I know for Scotland charges by the page for results so it works out pretty expensive to do speculative searches so I'd have to want to know really badly).

I tried ancestry but they wanted hard cash and I don't need to know that much .