Cornwall Civil Registration: Difference between revisions

Civil registration, which is the government recording of births, marriages, and deaths, was instituted in Cornwall at the same time as all of England, 1 July 1837.  The act establishing civil registration required that births be reported within 42 days and deaths within 5 days of the event.  With the institution of the act, civil marriages could now be performed at the registrar's office, and those performed in the churches were registered at least quarterly by the ecclesiastical authority or his representative.  Copies of the registration were sent by the district registrar to the Office for National Statistics each quarter, and they are indexed by calendar quarter.  Because of the time allowed to register, some events, especially births, may be registered in a later quarter than when they actually occurred.  A free index is available online at [http://www.freebmd.org.uk/ http://www.freebmd.org.uk/] but searchable indexing on this site, particularly after about 1925, is incomplete.  However, Ancestry.com has completed the searchable indexing of birth, marriage, and death registrations to 2005.  Coverage gaps, especially in the searchability of marriages and deaths, on most sites are still noted. The pages can be browsed on many of those sites and the reference found if one knows the date of the event.  Copies of the certificates can be obtained through the district registrar's office or from the General Register office online at [http://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/ http://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/].  The copy received from the GRO is actually a photocopy of a handwritten copy made at the district registrar's office, which was sent to the GRO, and the signatures are not in the hand of the parties to the event. Although accuracy is very high, there were occasional errors made while copying certificates for the official record now preserved at the GRO.