Joy - thanks for clarifying the date when burials had to have a certificate first - that would explain my feeling that I had examples that broke the supposed rule. Depending on what you meant by "possibly a third of these early registrations are missing" we may have to disagree on that. The 1874 Act was a sensible step, placing the onus of registration on the people who knew. However, if it was fixing a material problem, one would expect the numbers of registrations to get a boost. According to the serious studies of registration (whose name I have forgotten!), that simply doesn't happen - i.e. the system was already working well before 1874. Certainly in the first couple of years there were issues - one Poor Law Union actually refused to appoint a Registrar, reckoning it an unwarranted breach of privacy. But by and large, it seems to settle down quite quickly. I have indeed seen suggestions of 1/3 of births missing in relation to areas like Liverpool later on the in 19th century but I question how those figures were arrived at when compared to the conclusions from serious histories. Adrian On 16/09/2014 21:11, Joy Langdon wrote: > ... There was no penalty for failing to register a birth or death and it is believed that possibly a third of these early registrations are missing. > ... > It wasn't until 1926 that a registrar's certificate or coroner's order had to be produced before a burial could take place. >