A civil registration system for births, marriages and deaths was introduced in England and Wales on 1 July 1837. Registration was undertaken by people called Civil Registrars who reported to the Registrar General at the General Register Office (GRO) in London. This is now part of the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Since the original birth, marriage and death registers are not open to the public, getting access to the information on one of these certificates is done by first searching the national birth, marriage and death indexes, that have been created by the GRO for this purpose. The indexes for the three events are each divided into quarterly volumes, with the names for each quarter listed alphabetically. Once an entry in one of the indexes is found, you are then able to use that information to order of copy of a death, marriage or birth certificate from the GRO/ONS. The other information that can be obtained from the index includes:

• Year

• Record type (Birth, Marriage, or Death)

• Quarter (March, June, September, and December)

• District (each county in England and Wales was divided up into registration districts)

• Volume (early records may show this in Roman Numerals e.g. XXV, 25)

• Page number

It is important to note, that records that were entered into the volume of the quarter in which notification of the event was received, not necessarily the quarter in which the event actually occurred. For instance a birth might have occurred in December 1880, but not registered until January 1881, the record would then be found in the 1st quarter of 1881. So, it's important to search either side of the date that you're interested in.

There are two ways of searching for these records: 1) through the actual indexes, and 2) using the FreeBMD database. Using the actual Indexes you can only search using a forename, surname, quarter, and year. This will bring up all the pages that your ancestor might be on. You then have to look through the whole page to check if it matches what you're looking for. Using the FreeBMD search is a lot more easier, and friendly. You can search on a lot more details, down to actual parish, and you will only get actual matches return back, so it makes things a lot easier.

The enormous task of transcribing and, making searchable, the names contained in the GRO indexes has been underway for a few years now. And this information is now available for free, courtesy of the volunteers of the FreeBMD organization. The leadership of FreeBMD have organized the permissions and tools necessary to enable thousands of volunteers to convert to electronic text, and publish online, searchable indexes to the civil registrations in England and Wales. As of 25^th May 2008 the FreeBMD has managed to transcribe and index almost 200 Million records for the years of 1837 to 1983, and more names continue to be added everyday. You can see what the status is on their page here. Because of the nature of the index you will note that not all of the fields have been indexed all of the time. Until 1866, most of the indexes were handwritten, making the task of conversion sometimes difficult.

Knowing a marriage date will allow you to guess that the birth of their 1st child will normally be within the next couple of years, conversely knowing the birth date of the first child will allow you to guess the date of the marriage.