RootsChat.Com
General => The Common Room => Topic started by: jimmymac on Friday 04 April 08 22:57 BST (UK)
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I have several Catholic ancestors born in London between 1837 and 1875 for whom I have not yet found a birth registration. I wonder if anyone else has the same experience? I suspect that it wasn't part of the culture of poor Irish Catholics at that time. I asked Michael Gandy about it; he didn't like this explanation and suggested I look in the local register offices. This would imply that a number of local registrations did not make it into the national indexes. Any comments, anyone?
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Middlesex is famously short on birth ref's 1837-1875.
I don't think it a particularly Catholic thing.
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That's interesting about Middlesex. I have several lines in the county and it's only the Catholics where I have had trouble tracing the births. Is the problem a GRO one or at the local level?
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The rate of non-registration of births was actually quite low, probably about 7% overall in the period 1837-1875, but it was uneven, so it was much worse in the earliest years, and in areas that were either very rural or very overcrowded. A high number of poor migrants such as you find in London would not have helped, and cities like Birmingham and Liverpool had the same kind of problems.
Failure to find an entry is more likely to be the result of too narrow a search, or variations in spelling that you haven't thought of, or good old clerical error. However in this case there seem to be several births that you can't find, so it would be quite some coincidence if they were all the result of clerical errors. I agree with Michael Gandy up to a point (it happens occasionally!); the family may not have had a culture of registering, but it was probably more to do with being poor and Irish than being Catholic.
Mean_genie
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jimmymac,
post the names, approximate dates, and other info you have and perhaps someone will assist.
nick
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D. V. Glass, A Note on the Under-Registration of Births in Britain in the Nineteenth Century. Population Studies, Vol.5, Part 1 (July 1951), pp.70-88
This quotes the GRO reports of the first Registrar General, Farr, who estimated a 5% non-registration rate for births 1837-76, declining from 6.9% in 1841-50 to 1.8% in 1861-70, and although Farr didn't give his method Glass considers that the estimate should not be dismissed lightly given Farr's skill as a demographer and his intimate knowledge of the registration statistics.
1841-45: 8.2% (not very reliable - could be up to 2% higher)
1846-50: 6.4%
1851-55: 5.1%
1856-60: 3.4%
1861-65: 2.4%
1866-70: 1.6%
1871-75: 1.0%
1876-80: 0.4%
Stan
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I have Catholic forebears in London who seem to have registered births of their children in the early days of civil reg. They were middle class. So I agree with mean_genie - probably more to do with being poor and Irish than being Catholic!
(It's Catholic records BEFORE civil reg that are so difficult to find!)
MarieC
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I have a Cornelius Harrington who I know from his catholic baptism was born in 1854 but there is no birth registration for him. And his parents were both poor and Irish :-\
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Stan
Thanks for the figures - do you think we could get them printed on a T-shirt? I knew there was a article on the theme somewhere, but couldn't for the life of me remember which journal or when.
The minute change between 1871-75 and 1876-1880 neatly nails the myth that the 1874 Act made any difference at all to the rate of birth registration.
Mean_genie
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Some care must also be taken when comparing data on births in the early decades of registration and those from the period after about 1880, because of evidence of early under-registration. This means that a comparison over time between published birth rates in the mid to late nineteenth century would give an erroneous picture of trends. D. V. Glass estimated that in the first decade of registration one has to multiply the number of registered births by approximately 1.080 to obtain the number of actual births. Teitelbaum used an inflation factor of 1.060 for the same period. By the end of the 1870s both agreed that birth registration was probably complete, especially after the passage of the 1874 Births and Deaths Registration Act (37 & 38 Vict., c.88), which introduced fines on parents for non-registration (Glass; Teitelbaum). Both marriage and death registration appear to have been have been virtually complete from the inception of registration.
General comparability of Registrar-General's reports
Edward Higgs
http://www.rootschat.com/links/0351/
Stan
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Thanks everyone for your very interesting replies. I find this a fascinating subject (sad?). One of the people concerned is my great great grandfather John McCarthy. There is a possible baptism at the church of the Holy Family in Saffron Hill on 18 February 1855, which gives a birth date of 17 February 1855. Census returns give Holborn as the place of birth, or, in the case of 1871, St Andrews. I will gather the various examples together and post them on the London board.
James