Family Historian User Group

I'm not sure if this query best belongs here or a more general forum. If the moderator wants to move the post, please feel free!

AS has a very useful autotext template, 'Birth Certificate 1837- England/Wales' for birth certificates, that works well for birth certificates that have the original, horizontal ten-column format.

At some point in the 1960s (?) the format changed to a vertical layout with 17 rows, and I want to create a template for that alternate format. For the purposes of my being able to give my new template a descriptive name, does anyone know what year that change was introduced? I have an 'old-style' certificate from 1964, and 'new-style' one from 1969, so I imagine the switchover must have been at some point between those dates, unless the two formats overlapped for a while.

It looks like there was a similar change in death certificates too. Did that take place at the same time?

In the old WWW Forum, there was a thread that said

Certificates changed after 1969, I think it was, to include the child's surname.

Notice that this includes the caveat "I think"! This inclusion must surely have been at the same time as the new format.

I have tried to check in FMP to see if there's any visible difference in the GRO pages but I can't see anything useful. So sorry, that estimate of 1969 is the best I can do.

Murphy's law of hitting the <send> button.... The next reference in that forum that I turned up was from the illustrious Antony M, who is / was a registrar and said:

Birth registrations don't show any surname for the child before 1969 - only the given names of the child and the full names of the parent(s)

So 1969 is the first year when the format includes the child's surname, and that must surely match the change in format that you refer to.