Hi Nora Before mid 1837 when Civil Registration started in England & Wales there are no birth certificates, before that you would need Baptisms found in the Parish Registers The LDS are making their records available online, thankfully the first available are the BTs for Durham, Northumberland and a few in Yorkshire and Cumberland For Tynemouth they are available up to 1847 but may help you (and without leaving your chair which is nice :-) See http://pilot.familysearch.org/recordsearch/start.html#start Click on the map of Europe and select :- England, Diocese of Durham Bishop's Transcripts ca 1700-1900 They are not indexed and you need to go through page by page, you can usually get somewhere near the year you want by calculating where the year sought falls in the range of pages Also good to do as you often find connected names while trawling through Re your marriage From http://www.freebmd.org.uk/ Marriages Jun 1849 Avery William Tynemouth 25 475 Dawson Margaret Tynemouth 25 475 If you look it up yourself, click on the blue Tynemouth, this will take you to a page showing the areas covered by the Registration District of Tynemouth, your people could be born in any of them but Longbenton falls under Tynemouth District , the only way of finding out is order the birth certificate The marriage cert will show their respective fathers and occupations (if recorded) which should help take you further back Best wishes Nivard Ovington, in Cornwall (UK) Nivard, John, Stan, and the rest, Thank you for your direction. Her name was Jane Ann AVERY and I did find her on the FreeBMD site, leading to the reference number (XXV 462 Tynemouth) which I used to order a birth certificate. I like your country-wide standardized system of ordering BMD certificates. If she is registered in Tynemouth does that mean she was born in Longbenton or New Hartley? Or can one tell from that?