Tracing your family tree: so much you can learn from marriages and deaths

Our own expert, local family historian Chris Sutton has put together a guide to help you in the right direction. for those already doing their ‘tree’ there will be some things you might not have thought of or be aware of.

Here, in this second article, he takes a look at the value of marriage and death certificates

THE marriage certificate is the most informative one of the three (birth, marriage, death) in many ways.

They will tell you the date and venue for the weeding, the names of the bride and groom, their ages, addresses, and crucially also give the names and occupations of both of the happy couple’s fathers and their occupations.

Often ignored by researchers are the witnesses’ names which are also featured.

Always note them down because you won’t remember them and it does prove someone was alive and attending a marriage on that date.

Sooner or later you will be trying to narrow down what happened to an ancestor and when they were last recorded officially. A lot get recorded as witnesses.

At the bottom of the certificate you will see the signature or mark (if either could not write their name) of the bride, groom and witnesses.

This may be the only time you ever see a signature for one or more of these people. The father’s names are important, because they will help you look for the birth of the bride or groom.

When applying for a birth certificate you can stipulate that you only want it if the father’s name is the one you have on the marriage certificate.

The marriage certificate for Chris Sutton’s great-great-grandfather John Sutton and Rose Hannah Webb

The father’s name box also gives the bride or groom chance to name their father if they were born illegitimately. While an illegitimate birth certificate does not note the father, there was nothing to stop this being noted on the marriage certificate. Some would do it by changing the father’s surname to match their own so it all ‘looked right’.

If the father was deceased at the time of the wedding it was conventional to say so, but not enforced. Though there have been cases where a father was said to be deceased and was not emigrated for example. If either the bride or groom is noted as being of ‘full age’ this means they were 21 or older.

Can any of the information supplied be false? Yes, I have at least one case of bigamy in my own family tree where a lady is noted as a spinster but her previous husband was very alive and living elsewhere in Birmingham.

Divorce was rare for many years, especially among the working classes, so your only option was to start again elsewhere (if that was possible) and ‘forget’ your existing marriage.

Death certificates

These will give you the name of the deceased, the date of death, their occupation, their age at death, where they died and the name and usual residence of the informant.

A useful amendment came in 1969 when the date and place of birth of the deceased was added to the certificate. The informant is immediately interesting.

It won’t always be a family member and sometimes they clearly do not know when the deceased was born, so the reported age at death can vary accordingly.

They are the certificates that are bought least by family historians because they are reckoned to provide the least useful information. It is true they have less to offer than birth and marriage certificates, but if your budget runs to buying them they can turn up some surprising information.

Cause of death is the big one here. Most of the time you are going to see the ‘usual suspects’ such as typhoid, influenza, tuberculosis, cancer, heart failure etc., but you can strike lucky.

Well lucky for you as a researcher, if not your ancestor. I picked up the death certificate of a great great auntie, Edith Jakeman, because my grandmother was named after her, and there was family talk about a tragedy.

When I got it I found to my amazement that she had been killed on August 2 1914 in an automobile accident in Brighton. She was there with the lady who she worked for as a maid and got out of a buggy only to be hit by a car.

As a researcher it was useful because I was able to get hold of the local paper which reported the death and the subsequent inquest. The story was then picked up by the local paper in Leamington where Edith lived.

So the although it was a tragic accident I got to learn a lot I never would have had I not picked up that certificates.

The final point about death certificates is you do get addresses. Addresses are key points in your research. When and where your ancestors lived can be tricky to establish between the censuses so here is another way of establishing that.

Death certificate for John Sutton. John was a house painter by trade in Ladywood, Birmingham.

Tracing the register entries

If you are comfortable on using the internet, the first place you want to go is a site called Free BMD (freebmd.org.uk). It is not a complete copy of the General Register Office entried for births, marriages and deaths they are some years off being up to the current date.

For the period of the 19th century (from September quarter 1837) up until about the 1980s it is pretty much complete.

Data on the original entries, mirrored at Free BMD, is recorded in quarters March, June, September and December. All marriages took place in the quarter you find the entry in but births and deaths are different.

Because you had time to register a birth or death it means that the event could have taken place earlier than the quarter you find it in. A common example is people born in December in the run up to Christmas, you often find them listed in the March quarter of the following year.

Free BMD is a good place to start exploring siblings and aunts and uncles in your family. As an exercise try looking for a grand parent’s birth where you know the mother’s maiden name. So in my tree I could search for the surname Francis with a mother’s maiden name of Stenson.

Looking in the period around the First World War and putting in those details gives me my grandfather and all of his siblings.

You will see the districts where each birth is listed and it might be you get several ‘possible’s’ that don’t fit, because the combination of surname/ maiden name could apply to more families than yours.

Next time we will look a little more closely at the General Register Office and where to order certificates, and what to do when people are mysteriously missing in the registers.