Copies of Birth, Marriage or Death certificates for England or Wales can be ordered online directly from the GRO / Identity & Passport Service here.

Transcripts

You can search our fully transcribed index of births, marriages and deaths from 1837 to 2005. We have integrated these records with our SmartSearch technology.

SmartSearch technology links records together, for example, allowing you to jump from someone’s death record to their birth record. It also enables you to find potential children from a marriage, potential parents from a birth, and allows you to jump from one person’s marriage record to their partner’s record. You can also use the partner’s name to search for a marriage, e.g. searching for John Smith marrying Jane.

Original Image Indexes

If you have trouble locating someone within our transcribed records, we recommend looking at the original index. The original GRO Index from 1837 to 1983 was written or typed in alphabetical order for each quarter. These were then preserved on microfilm. The image of the original index page has been digitised and indexed by surname, forename and the initial of the first person on each page. This enables the system to search for the page that should contain that entry.