Adoption References

[dawnsh]

Hi dave1948

With ref to the /s on the entries you mention

From freebmd's help pages

https://www.freebmd.org.uk/search-results-help.html

What is the reason for a page number with a suffix letter S
Each quarter the Superintendent Registrar for a district sends copies of his/her register entries to the General Register Office who then apply a page number to the records for indexing purposes.

However, in some circumstances, e.g. when a birth is re-registered, a further supplementary copy is sent by the Registrar to the General Register Office which supersedes the original copy and in these cases the new entry is given a supplementary number.

This means an original page number in an entry such as 495 might be crossed out and replaced by a page number such as 1659/S or the supplementary number might just be added to the page number.

There are a number of reasons for re-registering a birth, such as:

    If at the time of registration the mother was not married to the baby's father, but they have since married, it is a legal duty to re-register the birth, even when the father's details were entered when the birth was originally registered.
    If the natural father's details were not recorded at the initial registration but there is now a wish to add them.

Unless you know the names before and after adoption, there is no way of finding one without the other in the GRO birth index and GRO adopted childrens index

[dawnsh]

Hi Flemming

The GRO adopted childrens index on fiche is compiled alphabetically by surname then first names and grouped as adoptions from 1927-1946, then 1947-1951, then annually from 1952 to 1969.

The index format then changes after 1970 so the entries are still compiled alphabetically but by year of birth.

As a minimum, the index always contains the child's name after adoption and the volume number and index entry number required to order the adoption certicificate. Some, but not all, of the indexes contain in addition the year of birth and some contain the date the entry was made in the index.

[Flemming]

Thanks for that, Dawn. Jogged the memory perfectly.

And also thanks for the reply to the question about '/S' suffixes. Just did a search on one quarter in 1960 for such listings - there's a lot of them.