Civil Registration

[John Balshaw]

I have a copy Marriage Certificate for 1877 at a Catholic church in Bury. The entry in Lancs BMD states "Bury Register Office or Registrar attended" Can anyone please tell me why the Lancs BMD entry does not show the name of the church and will a Registrar have actually attended the Marriage?

[jim1]

Hello & welcome
Can we have some names?
If the marriage took place in a Church there was no requirement
for a Registrar to attend.

[AntonyMMM]

If the marriage took place in a Church there was no requirement
for a Registrar to attend.

If the church was not CofE there was  - that was the case until the 1898 Marriage Act which allowed such churches/chapels to have there own "authorised person" to register the marriages.

[jim1]

I stand corrected. I thought it was much earlier than that.

[Tickettyboo]

I'd doubt that Lancs BMD would have been allowed to view the actual Registers but perhaps had access to the local Registrars index which would give them the Register No and possibly, where applicable, which Anglican church that register was from. Anglican Churches were the only ones who did not need the presence of a registrar to fulfill the civil requirement for the marriage to be legal.

Non conformist marriages, at that time,  needed a registrar present to cover the civil requirements but those civil registers would , I imagine, have marriages from various churches therefore Lancs BMD would not be able to tell if the marriages in those registers were at the Registrar's Office or a non conformist church.

Boo

[arthurk]

Marriage registers for two of the Bury RC churches have been transcribed at the Lancashire OPC site - scroll down this page for details:

https://www.lan-opc.org.uk/Bury/Bury/index.html

In both cases entries say they are transcribed from the original registers; one of them says they are held by Lancashire Archives. These will be the church's own non-statutory registers rather than the ones used to produce marriage certificates, but they are worth consulting as they often contain extra bits of information: at one of the churches they seem to have recorded at least some of the mothers' names, and at the other I spotted a witness's address.

As at least one of these registers is in the Archives it's not impossible that it can be seen at Ancestry or FindMyPast, but I haven't checked.

[John Balshaw]

Thank you all for your kind replies they have been very helpful and much appreciated. I will now do some more investigating.