Is there another way to find GRO index? My Grandfather's birth does not seem to have been registered.?

Question

My Grandfather was born in 1882. We know that! I cannot find any details of his birth on all the usual sites..Freebmd etc. Are local records more likely to produce an answer? He was born in Aston, Birmingham, probably...or it could have been Dudley..

Answer 1

You could try Birmingham Central Library which holds a full set of GRO indexes.

www.ancestry.co.uk is good but not free also www.bmdindex.co.uk or www.1837online.com

It might also be worth trying any of the census web sites such as have a look at the 1891 and 1901 census see if you can fins grandad and use the info to track him down.

Good luck

Answer 2

ancestry.com

Answer 3

You need to work around this problem, try and find him on the 1891 census, this will give you his approximate date of birth, and try and track down his Baptism record,

Some people fell through the system and the records do not show.

good luck and good hunting

Answer 4

Have you tried different spellings of his name? My great grandfather's death was registered as Frederick, but it turned out the name he was registered at birth was Alfred.

Answer 5

I know everyone else has made numerous suggestions, but remember back then a lot of people had strong accents, more so than now. The person who may have recorded the birth may not have put the correct spelling of the name.

I have part of my husbands family who started off as Hawksworth and because someone decided to spell it differently by putting an 'e' after the K and changing the name, it made things really difficult to find in the index's.

Try different ways of spelling the name.

Answer 6

Although everyone was supposed to be registered at birth,

some were not, I have four in my tree who were never registered, all in the mid to late 1800s.

You might find that he was probably baptised in the local church within a few days of birth, the register might even, if you are lucky, give the actual birth date also, until at least the1950s most babies were baptised into one of the religions, it has tailed off somewhat since then.

Too much reliance and faith is placed upon what people were supposed to do, some children were never registered at birth, some couples never got married so there was no registration, the only certainty is that everyone died, but their death may have gone unregistered. Everyone is supposed to be recorded in the census returns, they were not, those that were, often gave incorrect information to the enumerator, including wrong ages, and incorrect places of birth, sometimes because they did not know the correct information, often they just lied, people still do.

Parish records tend to be a lot more acurate, I suppose because people did not like to lie to a servant of the church,

who, in any case, probably knew everything that went on in their parish.

Answer 7

Its quite possible he was born towards the end of the year in 1882. In which case having 42 days (six weeks) , in which to register a birth it's possible he was registered at the beginning of 1883. My gr/gr/gran was born on 22:12:1885 and her birth registered in January 1886. Try doing a search of the March quarter 1883, I am pretty sure you will find him, or you could post his name and let the researchers find him for you.