* Birth/Death Certificate Year

[NickWalker]

I just wanted to see if I can get confirmation of something that has been raised by one of the beta testers of the next version of Ancestral Sources.

On an English birth certificate it has at the top, e.g:

1873 birth in...

The beta tester has said this should be the year of registration rather than year of birth and I do have a birth certificate which shows he is correct - a child born at the end of the previous year but registered in the following year has the registration year shown. I must admit I hadn't realised that before.

Before I amend the Ancestral Sources autotext templates can I get some confirmation that this is this also the case with death certificates i.e. year refers to registration rather than death? Do Scotland Births and Deaths work the same way?

Thanks

Nick

[tatewise]

I confirm that I have four English Birth Certificates where "Year Birth in..." is year following a December birth.

Have not found any Death Certificates with that scenario but would expect it to be year of registration. Perhaps it is less likely to be different from year of death because there are more pressures to register early than with birth.

From 1953 the Death Certificate format changed and states both the date of death near the top and the full date of registration near bottom but does not say "Year Death in...".

[delwoodman]

Nick:

I have an E&W death certificate where death was in Dec 1859 but was not registered until Jan 1860. As you will see it is headed 1860 Death in the sub-district of......

Derek

[LornaCraig]

Sorry to add to the confusion but I have a certificate for an English birth in December 1924, registered in January 1925, where the year in the heading is 1924, (the year of birth not the year of registration). This certificate was not issued until 1947, but I don't know whether that has any bearing on how it was formatted.

English birth (1924 reg 1925).JPG (110.33 KiB) Viewed 8008 times

[LornaCraig]

Do Scotland Births and Deaths work the same way?

The Scottish certificates have a different layout and don't have that heading at the top, so there is no room for confusion. Original certificates and modern certificates issued for 'old' events follow broadly the same layout, as far as I am aware. I attach some examples of the layout of birth and death certificates, although these are not cases where the event and the registration were in different years.

Scottish marriage certificates are also different from English ones in format. I even have an example of a marriage which took place in one year and was registered in the next, although the certificate makes this clear. See the example: marriage on 31 December 1875, registered 1 January 1876.

Scottish birth (original cert style).JPG (134.85 KiB) Viewed 8007 times

Scottish death (modern cert for old death).JPG (174.93 KiB) Viewed 8007 times

[jbtapscott]

Give that the certificates are "...extract of an entry in the register..." surely it is the year of registration that should be shown in the title area of the certificate, while the actual date of the event is shown in the central area with the other data (which also includes, at least on some certificates, the actual date [rather than year] of registration).

[carlineric]

The situation in Scotland is slightly more complex as you can either have the official "extract of an entry in the register of ..." aka certificate or either your personal transcription of the entry from a visit to GROS/ScotlandsPeople or downloaded image from ScotlandsPeople. The official extract is only for the entry in question and does not have a heading date - see examples above. On the other hand the image from ScotlandsPeople is for the whole page in the register and has the year of the register in a header - "1859 MARRIAGES in the Parish of Cambusnethan in the County of Lanark". From my transcripts I think that the change in format in 1966 resulted in the two being the same. I have a number of examples where the event has occurred towards the end of the year and has been entered in the register for the following year.

Eric

[tatewise]

Until computerisation was introduced, all copies were done by hand and therefore subject to human error.
So that probably explains the occassional exceptions such as the 1924/25 example given by Lorna on Wed Mar 04, 2015 1:11 am above.

[LornaCraig]

On the other hand the image from ScotlandsPeople is for the whole page in the register and has the year of the register in a header

Yes, that is true. And now that ScotlandsPeople publish images of the pages it is no longer necessary to order certificates. If you keep a full transcription in the Text from Source field this means that the format is different for the two types of document. The transcription from the page will start with "1876 Marriages in the Parish of Kilwinning in the County of Ayr", while the transcription of the certificate will say at the end that it is "extracted from a Register of Marriages for the Parish of Kilwinning in the County of Ayr.... " but with no reference to the actual register date.

As to which year should be shown in the title of the certificate for FH purposes, I am sure users will have different approaches. Some will use the date of the document, other will use the date of the event. (And what is the date of the document? The date of entry in the register, or the date the extract was made? Only in an 'original' certificate are these dates are the same). Others may not include a date in the title at all but use the date field to hold either the event date or the document date.

As with all things, what matters is consistency, and ensuring that someone else could easily understand where your information comes from.

[NickWalker]

Thank you for all your comments. I think for the next version of Ancestral Sources I'll make the 'Year' header be the registration year rather than the birth year. As usual where necessary, the user can edit that year if it doesn't match the actual certificate being entered.

Best wishes

Nick

[annejay55]

Just for clarity - in Scotland the images referred to which are 'not certificates' are only for Births over 100 years, marriages over 75 years and deaths over 50 years. Where they are less than that in time we have to order extracts/certificates.