Roy 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.... SLC