Video

Sadly, it seems The Gro index online shows that the years from 1957 to 1984 is missing.

A trick i learned from somewhere is just to check the nearest 05 and 10 dates with +/-2 years. If you use those all the time its less likely you will make a mistake in putting the correct year in. Ive found it helpful.

You can now purchase a digital copy of a certificate for £1.50, which is available immediately.

Thank you for your video, very informative, I would just like to ask what you would do if you didn’t know the mothers maiden name

I just ordered a hard copy birth certificate for my grandfather. They now cost £11 in 2024. Almost doubled in price...

Thank you for sharing this, I had no idea it existed, and it looks to be really helpful. Many thanks for your time in explaining, and for showing how to navigate through etc. Absolutely brilliant.

This is pants. I've put in all the accurate details for my ancestors and all I get is no results and I know fine well they are there and I've not put in anything incorrectly. I changed the area in case wrong it still took none of it for a selection of people not their births or deaths nothing.

Thank you, really enjoyed.

Helpful thank you.

why are the 'deaths' only until 1957? I fail to see why this is an obvious reason for the government to hold back death records?

Can’t find the death of my grandmother. Tried GRO…..they have searched the years before and after the year I had been told. So….wrong year I suppose. Can I look up for possible Coroners reports? Three theories of here death, MVA, brain haemorrhage or suicide. Irish family don’t like to talk. She supposedly died in Leeds. A mystery

Thanks so much for this very interesting presentation!

Levi Harris' immigration - my interest in Wolverhampton is that my wife's family, the Browns, of Gollantsch in German Poland, lived there from at least 1888: members of the family still live there, many of them were buried in the old Cemetery, including her great-great-grandparents, Morris and Eva Brown. I know something about emigration from the area around Kretinga / Crottingen up to the 1890s, because my own family began leaving Mariampol in Lithuania for Sunderland, in 1870 (oddly enough, many Kretinga Jews left en masse for Sunderland in around 1889, following a disastrous fire). Before the opening of a port on the eastern Baltic coast at Liepaja / Libau in the early 1890s, to cope with the first wave of mass emigration from Eastern Europe, the only feasible route to England was overland from Lithuania, and via Hamburg. I have this on very good authority, from an academic researcher. In terms of names: up to around the middle of the 19th century, Jewish surnames were based on patronymics, as Hebrew names are ("son of...", "daughter of..."). Thus - and you only have my word for this, as someone who had a solid Jewish education, and has done a lot of genealogical research - the surnames Aarons, Hart, Harris, Lazarus...all of them except Cohen, which you correctly identified as relating to priestly status (claiming direct descent from Aaron, Moses' brother), are all anglicised versions of patronymics. I would suggest that the Aarons brothers may well have come here alone - the 1841 Census bizarrely rounds adult ages (down?) to the nearest 5 years: so, 20, 20, and 15 would not be accurate, and that their surname would have been their father's first name, in any case (confirmed by the Hebrew on Simon Aarons' gravestone). It was very common for young Jewish men who left Eastern Europe to arrive in their late teens or early 20s: the Aarons came here very, very early, but this is very typical. The Brown family of Wolverhampton also has a connection to Nice. Joseph Brown (born Sunderland, 1881; lived in Wolverhampton from 1888 until some time before 1935, when he was in Birmingham; made a fortune from building contracting - his father, Lazarus Brown, was in the decorating business, and his uncle, Morris Brown, was a glazier, both in Wolverhampton; he either separated from or divorced his first wife at some point - she was buried in Brighton in 1974; he then married the (British) widow of an Italian marchese in 1940 - she had left the family chateau in Nice when WW2 was about to start; and he died at the American Hospital in Nice in 1949, his last address being given as Chateau Bornala, Avenue de Bellets, Nice. I know this is a heck of a long message, but you did say as well that you were interested in the Brown family! I did a lot of research for my late father-in-law, who sadly died at the end of last year. He knew nothing about his father's parents, because his father had been orphaned at the aged of 5, in Manchester. His father's parents were called Henry Moscovitch, and Selma Brown: both are buried in Manchester. After his mother died, my wife's grandfather, so my father-in-law said, had been sent to his grandparents (who turned out to be Eva and Morris Brown) in Wolverhampton, which is where my research started. You've got another Zelma Brown in the Wolverhampton graveyard: she and her namesake are cousins, but also sisters-in-law, because the one in Wolverhampton married Isaac Brown, Selma's brother - and there is a whole story there. Isaac was widowed in his late 40s, in 1928, at a point when he had grown his father's glazing business, also through contracting, and through expanding into wallpaper shops and market stalls. He would send his brothers out to international trade fairs. At one of these, in Berlin, in 1935, one of the brothers met a German Jewish sales representative, whose family were desperate to leave. They hatched a plan, whereby Isaac might be persuaded to marry the representative's little sister, who was nearly 30 years younger, but ill with periodic TB, and thereby get the whole family out. The little sister didn't want this, but was told by her mother that she might not live for very long, but she had it in her power to save her family's lives. The marriage took place in Wolverhampton, at the Synagogue, in 1936, and I was told this story by their son, who was born two years later. If you're still doing this research, and want to know more, please feel free to get in touch.

Sound is poor.

Neustadt is never was part of Warsaw. It is a town in Lithuania also named Wladislawow, today it is Kudirkos Naumiestis. Tumpowsky family are residents of Wolverhampton also were from Wladislawow.

Isaac Tumpowsky was a great uncle of actors brothers Swift- David and Clive. Isaac's father David Tumpowsky was many years President of jewish congregation in Wolverhampton, he went to Jerusalem in 1903 where he died in 1915.

The GRO don't let you search marriages?

UPDATE FROM GRO: " Coronavirus Following the introduction of the latest measures to reduce the spread of Covid-19, we may not be able to complete orders within the published timescales. To help ensure that our services are accessible to those that need them most throughout this period, if you are able to do so we would ask that you delay making your order until a later date. During this period we will not be able to provide information on the progress of orders, but please keep checking this page for further updates. If you are ordering Royal Mail Special Delivery or DHL delivery please check relevant website for updates on delivery information." The page referred to for an update for your order is where your orders are listed.

These records are available as PDFs to be emailed to you. "PDF's for historical digitised civil registration records held by GRO (birth entries from 1837 to 1919 and death entries from 1837 to 1957)" Other certificates including these are paper copies which are posted to you under normal circumstances.

Do not forget that although registration was introduced in 1837 it was not actually compulsory to register a birth until 1875 so you might be looking for a registration that does not exist.

can you please update! also on gov website is missing a lot of years, why is that?

What if you dont know the persons your looking for? but just using your surname helps?

This is excellent Andy, thank you for your work in this area and innovative use of technology to make the presentation available to a wide audience.

I'm pleased to say you & I work in almost exactly the same way, so I didn't actually learn anything new LOL One thing people need to bear in mind is that - if they've calculated the birth year from census age - they can easily be a year out. A person who is 30 years old in April 1881 _may_ have been born in 1851, but may also have been born in 1850...and that's provided the correct age is recorded on the census! Also remember that the GRO index dates are the date of registration. Somebody who is born or dies late in December may well not be registered until January. I had one instance where it appeared that a girl's mother had died the year before the girl was born. Her mother died in childbirth in December - the mother's death was registered in December, but the child's birth wasn't registered until January. (This caused some people to mistakenly ascribe the girl's step-mother as her birth mother, as her father remarried within a year)

I tried this but the GRO website has completely changed since you uploaded this video :(