Births can be re-registered for two main reasons -
- to add an unmarried father who was not named on the original registration
- and as previously mentioned also after the subsequent marriage of the parents.
Both of the above are common occurrences and not well understood by many researchers. Some births can be re-registered for each of the above reasons, giving three in total - and the re-registrations can be many years after the birth/first registration.
There are also occasions when the Registrar General may order a re-registration for any reason they see fit - often when an original entry has been found to be wrongly registered - such as by fraud, using false information or by an unqualified informant.
The sequence of events can sometimes be guessed from the indexes, but not always, and you would have to obtain copies of the various registrations to be certain.
If the first entry is indexed under the father's surname - and there is no matching index entry under the mother's surname in the same quarter - then that would indicate the parents were claiming to be married at that time. If that was not the case it might account for the 2nd registration (and then a third after the marriage).
