Family Historian User Group

This might have already been answered elsewhere but is there a reason why I cannot find any marriage records for the UK ater about 2010? I read somewhere they are only collated 4 times a years, am I missing something really simple? I was looking for a registry office marriage in 2012, I know it has to be a registry office affair as the person concerned has been married twice before and I am guessing Hampshire. Any help much appreciated.

I have moved this posting to the Research forum as it is not a Family Historian General Usage topic.

Marriages are all recorded but are not necessarily available online for recent years.
Exactly where have you looked?

BYW: They used to be collated quarterly before 1984 but since then are recorded digitally by month.

Thank you for putting it in the right place. I have used FMP, Ancestry.com and My Heritage.com all with the same result. I have tried births, marriages and deaths, the year is I believe 2012, I have tried by their names, maiden name and previous two married names in her case, and his name, I have even used dates of birth as added criteria the dates which I know are accurate and various counties as I thought they might have used either Hampshire or Surrey. Any suggestions would be welcome. I cannot ask them as we lost touch when we both moved.

If I remember correctly, there was a bit of a Data Protection fuss around about 2005, and the GRO stopped providing the Index data. Nothing was ever sorted out legally if I recall, the lawyers involved just thought that the GRO might get in trouble so they stopped out of caution (it's a while ago so I'm open to correction). For a year or two I think Ancestry, etc., managed to get the data elsewhere but then it stopped. So for a long time the were no births, deaths or marriages Indexes for years after about 2007 published on the big sites.

The GRO then decided to modernise and publish their own Indexes, as you're probably aware. The trouble is they ran out of funding and so the Birth and Death Indexes are incomplete, and they never started on Marriages at all, so only the transcribed Indexes up to about 1990 and the electronic Indexes up to about 2007(ish) are available on FreeBMD and pay sites.

You can ask the GRO to do a search for you and order a certificate for about £14. The URL is https://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/cert ... select.asp - You have a to give a fair amount of information, which you may or may not have.

EDIT: I just checked on the data required for a search and as well as other things you have to know the date and place of marriage, so unfortunately they are unlikely to be able to help you.

Thank you for your very comprehensive answer, I will have to try some other way to find them.

The only way to find post 2006 Marriages will be to look at the Microfiched Indexes, which are held at the folllowing places.

Bridgend Local and Family History Centre
City of Westminster Archives Centre
Manchester Central Library
Newcastle City Library
Plymouth Central Library
The British Library and
The Library of Birmingham

Thank you, unfortunately I live miles from any of those places. It is going to make research for future generations a lot harder I think.

I don’t think our hobby trumps legitimate data protection issues. Sites such as Ancestry, FMP, etc, are for access to historic records, not as a tool to aid identity theft.

Consider yourself lucky - in my experience, England & Wales have one of the more generous interpretations of what can be published. Other countries not too far away place much more draconian limits on internet access to records related to living individuals.

What I meant was that our grandchildren or even their granchildren will find a huge period that has no records post 2006 or therabouts so nowhere to start to help link them to us. Of course things miay change in a few years time

Indeed - I suspect it will be a rolling closed period (a few years or decades, depending on the mood of the times). The bigger issue may be interpreting the records, as the traditional monoculture nuclear family becomes less and less common...

I'm not clear whether the GRO's cessation of providing indexes to commercial companies had anything to do with Data Protection, or whether the GRO (England & Wales) had a sudden burst of "Anything not explicitly permitted is forbidden". 2005-ish is way before GDPR though that doesn't preclude similar issues under the old legislation.

The problem is that if it really was a case of "Oh we're not allowed to make money by selling access to our indexes", then nothing will change that in the forseeable. Maybe GRO are still hoping someone will pay them loadsa money to finish off their existing systems...

You should thank your lucky stars that you are not tracing family in New South Wales.
On-line BMD availability is as follows (as are physical copies)
No Birth indices after 1922 -100 years
No Death indices after 1992 - 30 years
No Marriage Indices after 1972 - 50 years
These are all, apparently, based on privacy regulations.
So you get register number, year and name, parents names and registration district on both Birth and Death indices
Examples:
Birth 6649/1869 EAGLES ALICE A ROBERT ELIZA BATHURST
Death CARD ELIZABETH ANN 6679/1939 ROBERT ANN WEST MAITLAND
Marriage 4796 / 1881 CARD ABRAHAM H COLLARD ELIZABETH A MORPETH
The worst is the Birth restriction. There are no child records available for couples married after 1922, even though their marriage details are there.
I don't know about the other states, as we have no relatives in them (that we know of)!
Roger

rodit wrote: ↑

27 Feb 2023 05:31

You should thank your lucky stars that you are not tracing family in New South Wales.
On-line BMD availability is as follows (as are physical copies)
No Birth indices after 1922 -100 years
No Death indices after 1992 - 30 years
No Marriage Indices after 1972 - 50 years
These are all, apparently, based on privacy regulations.
So you get register number, year and name, parents names and registration district on both Birth and Death indices
Examples:
Birth 6649/1869 EAGLES ALICE A ROBERT ELIZA BATHURST
Death CARD ELIZABETH ANN 6679/1939 ROBERT ANN WEST MAITLAND
Marriage 4796 / 1881 CARD ABRAHAM H COLLARD ELIZABETH A MORPETH
The worst is the Birth restriction. There are no child records available for couples married after 1922, even though their marriage details are there.
I don't know about the other states, as we have no relatives in them (that we know of)!
Roger

And Queensland and South Australia slightly worse:
Births - 100 years
Marriages - 75 years
Deaths - 30 years

Since you know the people perhaps you could try to find them using an electoral roll search and get back in touch.
David