After deciding which line of your family you want to trace and have found out some basic information from living relatives or your own family knowledge, you can now begin to construct your descent.

With a bit of luck (and some genealogists need a lot of it) you can expect to trace your family line back to the 16th/17th century. Some can go much further back, but it is usually the well-to-do families that can call on resources such as published pedigree charts in their quest. Records of the lives of 'ag labs' (agricultural labourers) or unskilled workers need a fair amout of digging for the further back you go.

Since 1837 it has been a legal requirement to register a birth with the Registrar General. An informant - usually the baby's mother or husband - will provide information which includes the name and sex of child, date of registration, the date and place of birth, occupation of the child's father and, importantly, the mother's maiden name, which in turn can lead you to the parents' marriage.

If the child was illegitimate - and you will usually come across this somehwere in your tree - the mother's name only will normally appear. However, if the father is mentioned, the mother will retain her acknowledged surname.

It is now a relatively simple process to find a person's birth certificate.
Go to http://freebmd.rootsweb.com/ and you will discover a fantastic resource which lists when a person's birth was registered, the registration district and the volume/page number it can be found in. Sometimes it is obvious which record you need, but beware, you could, for example, find half a dozen John Kellys who were registered in Liverpool in any given month.
Also the site is not 100 per cent complete, but a full index of the coverage in specific areas is available. The marriage and death records on the site will feature in a later blog.

There are a number of reasons you may not be able to find a birth certificate: It could have been wrongly indexed; registered in a district that does not cover the area the parents lived in or the original data could be incorrect - information from living family members can be misleading ( for example a child could commonly be known by a name that he was not baptized with - I spent hours searching for a John Wood, only to discover he was baptized Patrick John Wood).

Civil registration began in 1837 and technically every birth should have been registered since that time. However, particularly in the early years, some births slipped though the net.

The freebmd website contains a full list of instructions for ordering certificates online via a link to the General Register Office http://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/certificates/
A birth certificate costs between £5.50 and £11.50, depending on the type of service you require. A postal application takes between 7 and 10 days to drop though your letter box.

Once you have received a birth certificate for your chosen ancestor you will be in possession of some basic information to seek the parents' marriage certificate.

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