SLC wrote..... >>Re...US birth registration ... It differs from state to state..some states have birth records back father than other ones...some states did not have to have birth records till the late 1800's...for all of my gggrandparents children I found 1 record of birth in Fall River, Mass for 1869 that required births to be registered....1 child in Ohio early 1870's that his birth is recorded and as for the other 5 children their info was found in a search done by the Diocese of Pittsburg Pennsylvania for the rest of the 1870's as birth registration was not required for the area in Pennsylvania that they lived...neither were death certificates required for that time frame...without the search papers done for me by the Diocese of Pittsburgh I would have no records on them.... Where in the UK I have birth registrations, death registrations and marriage registrations clear back to the start of Civil Registration...makes me mad that our US registrations for those years were not as good as the UK was...we simply did not keep good records here in those days...thats why we have to have searches done by various church organizations, wills to be found and searched, graveyards to be haunted to find family members, land papers of those that owned land, I could go on and on on the places we here have to search for info cause of the lack of those much needed registrations back then....<< THANK you, yes, I do understand. What with the lack of proper immigration records and the haphazard way from one state to another in which your early records seem to have been kept, I can understand how difficult ancestry research becomes. You will, I hope, forgive me for saying this, but this is one reason why we in the UK are grateful that we have always had just one political system of central government and not a fragmented system of each county governing itself independently, which would be the equivalent of your state system. We do, of course, have local government in the form of counties and cities making their own decisions on purely local issues, but ultimately all are controlled by the central (federal, you would call it) government in London. I realise the two situations are hardly comparable, due to the vast difference in respective geographical sizes, but it does make things much neater for genealogists when there is one central system under which all records of births, marriages and deaths operate. I refer, of course, just to England and Wales. Scotland has its own separate system and so does Ireland. Here in the UK there is no reason why the vast majority of folks should not be able to reach back at least into the 1840s in civil registration. We then use the census returns from 1841 to 1891 to discover where our ancestors were born, and after that you are onto the parish registers (and the IGI). With reasonable luck, many people can get back to the early 1700s/late 1600s and many even much earlier, depending on how far back the parish registers go and how wealthy their ancestors were. This latter factor is, of course, very important, since if your family were landed gentry and owned property the likelihood of them leaving records is that much greater. Ironically, though, it is the two classes of people at the extremes who are best recorded - the rich and the really poor. The rich I have explained, but there is also quite a wealth of information and records on the very poor, since they often appear in Poor Law documents, settlement certificates and that sort of thing. It is the great mass of ordinary people in between, who were neither rich nor extremely poor, who were least recorded! Roy Stockdill Editor, The Journal of One-Name Studies The Stockdill Family History Society (Guild of One-Name Studies, FedFHS) STOCKDILL PREST YELLOW BOLTON WORSNOP GIBSON MIDGLEY BRACEWELL SHACKLETON BRADLEY MOODY in Yorkshire North & West Ridings MEAD YOUNG in Somerset, Wiltshire & Gloucestershire Web page of the Stockdill Family History Society:- http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/roystock ”Never ask a man if he comes from Yorkshire. If he does he will tell you. If he does not, why humiliate him?" - Canon Sydney Smith (scholar and humorist 1771-1845)