Birth Registation 1850s

[Hackstaple]

Today Rochdale and Salford are both included in Greater  Manchester. They are only about 12 to 14 miles apart so a move from one to the other would be quite a small trip. Workers tended to go where the work was - they did not usually have a wealth of household goods to make moves difficult. Rochdale was at the very centre of the very large cotton spinning and weaving industry. Much of the locally produced cloth was made up into shirts, riding habits and the like within the towns. Yorkshire did much the same with its wool industry. I would imagine work for a good tailor to be plentiful.

[Marmitch]

Yes, it would appear that the family moved on mass from Salford to Rochdale, possibly during the early part of the 1860s (I'm still trying to trace them on the 1861 Census). Thomas costello may have been married twice, with the older children living nearby in Salford, but going from what little I can ascertain from records, ther seems to have been a mass exodus of possibly 3 or more households of the Costellos, from Salford to Rochdale during this period. Most likely they moved for the work, as all are listed in later censuses as working within the cotton industry.

[corinne]

What is much much more possible is that it was actually registered, but hasn't made it into the indexes properly.  Someone has done some research on the accuracy of bmd indexes (Mike someone) and actually written a book about it all, and his conclusions were quite shocking with an enormous number of wrong or missing index entries. 

What you can do if you know the approximate date of the entry is to apply directly to the registration office concerned and get them to do a search.  You can find addresses for registry offices by doing a search on the web.  If it is an old office that has now closed, then it is reasonably easy to find out which current office holds the old records.

[Berlin-Bob]

Corinne,
I think this is the Mike you are meaning:

A COMEDY OF ERRORS
The story of the civil registration of births, marriages and deaths in England and Wales in the 1800s, by Michael Whitfield Foster
http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/mikefost/

Thanks for reminding me, well worth reading (and re-reading) !

[Marmitch]

Thanks for the information. If I can ascertain which district the family were likely to be living in around the time of her birth, I will then look at the possibility that an error in transcribing the records was responsible for her birth being absent from the BMD index.