Finding Birth and death records/certificates

TiddlyPom

A member of my family is considering converting to Judaism and needs copies of his parents birth and death certificates. My Father has asked me to do this for him.
I really have no clue where to begin and how to achieve this as cheaply as possible. I've looked at the online sites, but they all seem to charge a fortune and I can't see from the sparse info they give at sign up whether I can get actual copies of the certificates from them rather than just finding information and seeing records.

Is anyone able to point me in the right direction please?
Many thanks in advance.

Melonade

As far as I know you'll have to pay for them. Usually about £10 each with a postage fee depending how quickly you need them.

I doubt you'll be able to just ask for the info you need, they'll send you a copy of the actual certificates.

pimento

Make sure you order them from the official site.

http://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/certificates/

Hermia

I agree re: contacting the GRO. If your local library has an Ancestry subscription you can look up the parents on there and get the volume/page numbers etc which will help the GRO track them down.

MissGolightly

Pimento is right, GRO charge £9.25 per certificate. You shouldn't pay any more or less than this.

There are sites such as findmypast.co.uk and ancestry.co.uk where you can search on certain criteria, such as all children born with surname bloggs, whose mother's maiden name was jones, but this would be more for people wishing to put together a family tree or similar.

All you need to order from GRO online is the year of registration, name of the individual concerned, place of registration, and date of the event (within one year, i.e. if you know your grandmother was born in 1920 you can put 01/01/1920 and they will search one year either side)

Jojo_the_Tightfisted

What do you do if you don't know the year of registration, full name (as that often doesn't represent the name they used in adult life), place or date of the birth?

TonyMMM

Jojo_the_Tightfisted wrote: »

What do you do if you don't know the year of registration, full name (as that often doesn't represent the name they used in adult life), place or date of the birth?

Then you need to do some digging through any paperwork you can find (passports ?), talk to relatives - get as much information as you can to narrow down the possibles, and then sometimes you still end up having to order a few certificates just to find the right one....

RAS

Starting point is to work back from known information and confirm that before moving backwards.

In England and Wales more recent death certificates give the date of birth as well as the age.

If you go to the local family history library, you can look at microfiche copies of the national indexes. Most large cities and most counties have at least one with the national indexes. That means that you can search the indexes backwards and forwards of the expected date. Also check for John/John William/William/William John/Bill/Will Smith.

When I located my grandmother's birth certificate (right names, right town but four years earlier than expected), I found that her father's name was not "John" as I had been told but Michael John. Which explained why I had been unable to find his death certificate.

Jojo_the_Tightfisted

TonyMMM wrote: »

Then you need to do some digging through any paperwork you can find (passports ?), talk to relatives - get as much information as you can to narrow down the possibles, and then sometimes you still end up having to order a few certificates just to find the right one....

Unfortunately, there are no relatives and no paperwork.

RAS

Do you have any information at all?

Did this person ever marry?

converted

If you know where they are buried, you can contact the local authority responsible for the burial ground - at the least you would need to know the name and approximate date(year) of death. They can tell you burial date and age of person buried and who else is in the grave.

This works better if they have an unusual name. When I was starting my family tree, all I knew was my great grandfathers name (Alexander Alexander) and that he had died sometime during WW2. We thought this was an unusual name, but there was something like 20 other Alexander Alexander's in the graveyard. But managed to narrow it down to the war years, it was then confirmed with his wife's name who was in there with him. From that they told me what age he was when he died, which allowed me to work out when he was born and find his birth certificate. I have done this on a couple of occasions and it has worked.