In a message dated 05/08/2007 22:13:01 GMT Daylight Time, [email protected] writes: Is there any chance your John Robson's parents may have been hard up at the time of hs birth and simply couldn't afford to register him? I know it took my dad's family 6 weeks to come up with the money to register him as they were out on strike at Dawdon Pit at the time of his birth. Your family may never have found the money and either never registered him or registered him at a completely different time. Skye: This sounds like a "family story" that has been embellished with time. There is no fee for registration. I agree that the father would not want to have to take time off from work to do it, but that could well be why most registrations were made by the mother anyway. Travelling into the town to make the registration might cost a fare as well as time, but for Hetton le Hole c1840 the local registrar would be in Houghton le Spring - not much more than a short walk by the standards of the day (or even of today for a reasonably fit person). From Dawdon they would probably have had to go to Easington (a few miles) or possibly (I'm not sure) only to Seaham, which is more or less "next door". On thinking further about the original query, I suspect that what might have happened was that the parents were confused about this new registration business. They were probably not very religious people, and had had their earlier children baptised just because they saw it as a form of registration, which effectively it had been under the Old Poor Law until the mid-1830s. They had probably been told that this new civil registration made baptism unnecessary for civil purposes, so they didn't bother with a baptism. However, they could have been told, after that, that even civil registration was not compulsory, and so they decided that, regardless of whether or not it saved them money, they just wouldn't bother with the hassle and time involved in doing that either! It is a fact that there was considerable under-registration in the first few years of civil registration (everywhere except South Shields, that is, whose registrar was prosecuted for inventing the registrations of non-existing children, to maximise his commission which depended on how many he registered!). Geoff Nicholson