UK Birth, Marriage and Death Certificates (England & Wales)

Every birth, marriage and death registered in England and Wales since 1 July 1837 is recorded in a civil register. A full certificate is a certified copy of one entry, and for family history it gives you names, dates, places, occupations and, above all, parents’ names. You find the entry in the free GRO index or on FreeBMD, then order a copy from the General Register Office (GRO) or from the local register office for the district where the event was registered.

For older births and deaths you do not always need a paper certificate. The GRO also sells cheaper digital copies of historical entries. They show the same details and are ideal for research, but cannot be used for official purposes such as a passport application.

What each certificate shows

The layout of the registers changed on 1 April 1969, when new rules added more detail to birth and death entries. These are the columns you will usually see.

Birth certificate

Date and place of birth (later entries are more likely to give a full address)
Forename(s) and sex of the child
Father’s name and occupation (a blank father’s column may mean the parents were not married to each other)
Mother’s name and maiden surname
Informant: usually a parent, with their address
Date of registration and any name added after registration, for example at baptism
From 1 April 1969: the places of birth of both parents

A short birth certificate shows only the name, date and place of birth and sex, with no parents. For family history always order the full certificate. The fee is the same.

Marriage certificate

Date and place of marriage, and whether by banns, licence or certificate
Names, ages, condition (bachelor, spinster, widower, widow or divorced) and occupations of both parties
Residence at the time of marriage
Name and occupation of each party’s father; marriages from 4 May 2021 record mothers as well
Signatures of the couple and at least two witnesses

“Of full age” means over 21, not an exact age. Witnesses are often siblings, cousins or friends from the same community, so note their names.

Death certificate

Date and place of death
Name used at the time of death, sex and age
Occupation (for a woman, often her husband’s or father’s occupation)
Cause of death, and whether it was certified by a doctor or followed an inquest
Informant’s name, address and, after 1875, relationship to the deceased
From 1 April 1969: date and place of birth, usual address and, for a married woman, her maiden surname

The age on a death certificate is only what the informant believed, and it is often a year or two out.

Searching the GRO index

The GRO’s own online index is free to search once you register an account at gro.gov.uk. When checked in September 2026 it covered births from 1837 to 1934 and deaths from 1837 to 1957, plus births and deaths from 1984 to about two years ago. There is no GRO online index for marriages.

Because this index was compiled afresh from the registers, it includes details missing from the old printed quarterly indexes:

Births: the mother’s maiden surname for every entry from 1837 (the printed indexes only show it from the September quarter of 1911)
Deaths: the age at death from 1837 (the printed indexes only show it from 1866)
Search options for name variants, forename derivatives and a range of up to two years either side of the year you enter

The index is arranged by year of registration, not year of event. A baby born in late December may be in the next year’s first quarter, and a death that went to an inquest may be registered weeks later.

Reading a reference

A GRO index reference identifies the entry by year, quarter, registration district, volume and page. The GRO’s own example is March 1954 2a 222: March quarter 1954, volume 2a, page 222. Until 1983 the indexes are split into quarters (March, June, September and December), each covering events registered in the three months ending that month. The volume number stands for a group of registration districts. Write the whole reference down, including the district name, because it is what you quote when you order.

FreeBMD and other indexes

FreeBMD is a free, volunteer-run transcription of the GRO quarterly indexes for births, marriages and deaths, run by the charity Free UK Genealogy. It is the easiest free place to search marriages. It covers 1837 to 1999, but the transcription is unfinished, so check the coverage charts before you decide an entry does not exist.

For marriages, search for both the bride and the groom. Two names indexed in the same quarter, district, volume and page are usually on the same register page and may be the couple. Confirm it with the certificate.

Ancestry, Findmypast and FamilySearch also host versions of the indexes, some with images of the printed pages. Some regions have local BMD websites built from the register office indexes, which list the local register entry rather than the GRO reference. Commercial sites charge for full access; the GRO index and FreeBMD are free.

Ordering a certificate or digital copy

Order online through GOV.UK, which takes you to the GRO ordering site. Quoting the GRO index reference makes the order cheaper and faster. The GRO’s published online prices at the time of writing (September 2026) are:

Product	Online price	Notes
Full certificate, standard service	£12.50	Despatched on the fourth working day with a GRO reference; the fifteenth working day without one
Search fee if you have no GRO reference	£3.50 extra	The GRO searches the year you give plus one year either side
Full certificate, priority service	£38.50	Despatched the next working day if ordered by 4pm
PDF of a historical entry	£8.00	Births 1837 to about 100 years ago, deaths 1837 to 1957; GRO reference required; aim of 4 working days
Online View digital image (JPEG)	£3.00	Same date range as PDFs; GRO reference required; available in your account once the order is complete

Phone and postal orders cost more. PDFs and Online View images can only be ordered online, are not available for marriages, and stay in your GRO account for three months, so download them straight away. They have no evidential value: for a passport, a citizenship application or any other official use you need the paper certificate. If the GRO cannot find the entry it keeps £4.00 of the fee.

GRO or the local register office?

The local register office holds the original register for its district, and you can order a certificate from it if you know where the event was registered. Fees, ordering methods and turnaround vary, so check the office’s own website. Local offices file entries by their own register and entry numbers rather than the GRO volume and page, so give them the full name, date and place of the event.

Local offices are the better choice for very recent events: the GRO cannot issue certificates for births and deaths from the last six months, or marriages from the last 18 months. For most historical research the GRO, with a reference from its index, is the simplest route.

Common problems and how to solve them

Late, missing or misplaced registrations

Births were supposed to be registered within 42 days, but parents only became legally responsible for registering them when the Births and Deaths Registration Act 1874 came into force on 1 January 1875. Before then, some births were never registered at all. Late registrations appear in a later quarter than the event, so widen your search by a quarter or a year. A child registered before a name was chosen appears at the end of the surname list as “male” or “female”. Events are registered in the district where they happened, not where the family lived, which matters for hospital births and deaths.

Wrong ages

No proof of age was needed. People rounded their ages, knocked a few years off at marriage or simply gave “full age”, and an informant at a death may have guessed. Search a range of years and compare several documents before you fix a year of birth.

Anglicised and misspelled Polish names

English registrars wrote what they heard. Polish letters such as ł, ś, ż and ó were usually dropped, and spellings changed from one document to the next: Szczepański may appear as Sczepanski or Shepanski. Forenames were often anglicised, so Jan became John, Józef became Joseph and Stanisław became Stanley. Some families changed the surname completely, sometimes by deed poll. Use the GRO’s variant options, try phonetic spellings, and search on the forename, district and approximate age when the surname defeats you.

A birthplace given only as “Poland”

Birth and death entries from 1 April 1969 record places of birth, but for someone born in Poland the registrar often wrote only “Poland”. Where a town is given, it may be misspelled, written in its German or Russian form, or now lie in Ukraine, Belarus or Lithuania. Treat it as a lead to check, not a final answer.

From a British certificate to a Polish record

For a Polish-born ancestor who married or died in England or Wales, the British certificate is often the best route back to Poland. Look for these clues:

Father’s name and occupation on the marriage certificate. Polish birth and marriage entries name the father, so this is your best check that you have the right person.
Age at marriage or death, which gives an approximate year of birth. Search a range of at least two years either side.
Place of birth, on post-1969 death certificates and on the children’s post-1969 birth certificates. Even “Poland” is a start when combined with other sources.
Condition (bachelor or widower) and the witnesses, who may be relatives or men from the same unit or home town.
The spelling of the name, which tells you how the ancestor was written in Britain, not necessarily how the Polish priest or registrar wrote it.

Here is an illustrative example with invented details. A 1948 marriage certificate in Lancashire gives the groom as John Kowalski, aged 27, bachelor, labourer, father Joseph Kowalski, farmer. That points to a Jan Kowalski born around 1920 or 1921, son of Józef, a farmer. With no town named, you would look for his birthplace in other British records, such as naturalisation papers or military service files, and then search the Polish parish or civil registers for that place. Our guide to finding a birth entry in Poland explains that next step, and Polish surnames explained helps you rebuild the original spelling of an anglicised name.

If the certificate names a town, check the Polish indexes early: Geneteka covers many parishes and can often confirm the parents’ names quickly.

Scotland and Northern Ireland

Scotland has its own civil registration from 1 January 1855, searchable on ScotlandsPeople. Northern Ireland records are held by the General Register Office for Northern Ireland and searched through GRONI online.