Marriage certificates provide less detailed information but might provide access to evasive information such as the parties' father's names and occupations, addresses at the date of marriage, professions, and so on. One of the so-called skeletons in most family cupboards is that of parents either not married until after the birth of one or more of their children, or else married in haste as an imminent birth approaches. But though it might upset many clients and their relatives to discover such information relating to their dear departed, even people still living, it was not actually all that uncommon an occurrence for couples several generations ago to wait until pregnancy, even birth, to decide to tie the knot.

Death certificates amongst other details will usually include age, occupation, location, date and cause of death.

Adoptions certificates. Even where recorded they often give just the adoptive name of the child and new parents, with no information provided regarding the child prior to adoption, other than the correct date of birth. Incidentally, various legal and social requirements surround access to adoption information, most of it hinging on the age of the individual adopted. It is not always easy to gain access to information even today regarding natural parents, something which might make your job somewhat harder if you are tracing a 'natural' family tree.

Access to Information Prior to Registration

Amongst the most informative of sources available from which to extract information relating to births, deaths and marriages, along with other essential information, are County or Parish Registers which go back to 1538, though their accuracy is often open to debate. The accuracy of the entry might not however always be attributed to the skill or otherwise of the recorder; if that person to whom the entry pertained was illiterate and could not provide the accurate spelling of his or her own name, then the recorder would use his own judgement and make the entry as he believed it to be.

The fact that such anomalies creep many times into the history of just one family, well explains the changes one often finds to the surname of today's descendants from those whose records were entered centuries before.

County (Parish) Registers

In the majority of instances, parish records are now maintained at central libraries in larger cities, or at the various County Record Offices.

Photocopies of entries in parish registers can usually be obtained for a small sum. Official records such as birth, marriage or death certificates might also be obtained, but will cost you a few dollars for each copy requested; still not a high price to pay for the amount of information most official documents contain, and which can greatly reduce the time you might otherwise spend researching one minor point which might be provided on the certificate itself.

Parish registers in England go back as far as 1538, to the time when Thomas Cromwell ordered all churches to maintain records of baptisms, marriages and burials within the area of their jurisdiction. From 1598, parish clerks were ordered to forward transcripts of the registers every year to their local bishop. This continued until 1837 when civil registration came into being.

Most parish registers are now available for inspection at County Record Offices (CROs), in the main town or city of the county. On a few isolated occasions one comes by registers which have not been deposited as ordered with appropriate  bishops, such documents usually being well cared for by the vicar or other representative in the parish concerned.

Of parish registers themselves a few brief notes might be made. Marriage  records can prove particularly useful since they provide the names of both parties, the groom's occupation, their parishes, marital status, and sometimes details of bride's father, parties' ages, and so on.

Marriages during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can present tremendous problems for the researcher, since the need to have banns read and licences obtained could be expensive, lengthy and problematic. Many couples therefore hid under the cloak of ceremonies carried out secretly by parsons who would ask little if anything of the couple but enough to comply with basic legal requirements. Sometimes no-one checked too carefully on the personal credentials  either, and it is almost certain that a great many 'marriages' carried out during the period are anything near as binding as the parties to them might have thought.

Elopements, bigamy and fly-by-night marriages flourished under the practice which can lead many genealogists to despair as the plot grows ever thicker. In 1754 an Act of Parliament was passed aimed at eliminating  clandestine  marriages. Many ceremonies were to be performed in parish churches or other designated religious premises.

Baptism records provide a great deal of information regarding our ancestors, usually giving the father's surname for legitimate children - the mother's for illegitimate - and also usually indicating the place of birth, father's occupation, clergyman at the ceremony and sometimes a few other snippets of useful information.

Parish registers noted baptisms, not births. Therefore it is usual only to find conformists registered in this way. Any ancestor not recorded in parish registers might therefore belong to non-conforist persuasions such as Quakers, Jews and Roman Catholics, all of which kept their own usually well-maintained  records.