Table of Contents

Registrar General's annual reports

After civil registration was introduced in England and Wales in 1837, the Registrar General produced an annual report. These reports do not contain information about individuals, but they can still be interesting for family historians. The contents of the reports varied over the years; usually, there were scientific abstracts concerning births, marriages and deaths; other pages concerned meteorology, prices of provisions and international vital statistics. The reports are also useful for finding the names and order of sub-registration districts, which is necessary to interpret information in the GRO birth and death indexes as detailed here.

Sample Abstracts

Abstracts are available for births and deaths by sub-district in reports 10-73 (1847-1910), and for marriages by district in reports 4-47 (1840-1884).

births and deaths in 1873marriages in 1850

Other Sample Pages

triple and quadruple births in 1845remarriages of divorced men and women 1861-71deaths by lightning in the years 1857, 1858, 1859deaths of centenarians in 1871female suicides by method in 1881deaths in institutions in 1891male deaths from murder in 1910

Downloads

The reports are available on the website http://www.histpop.org, but this is difficult to navigate and frequently inaccessible. Most of the reports up to 1918 are available to download in their entirety from the Internet Archive:

It is still possible to view the pages on the website histpop.org, even when the 'This web service is too busy at the moment.Please try again later.' message is being shown, by directly visiting the url of the page you wish to see. The url is comprised of the following components:

e.g. page 22 of the main body of the first Registrar General's report would be: 

 http://www.histpop.org/resources/pngs/0461/00200/00022_50.png

If you paste this into the address bar of your web browser, you will see the page detailing the deaths in Birmingham in 1837-1838. To go the next page, simply edit the url and change 00022 to 00023.

Census Reports

The Registrar General was also responsible for conducting every census since 1841, and census reports were produced with abstracts of the data collected. A list of census reports is available at the Vision of Britain website. The reports are available at histpop, but as noted above, this site is frequently unavailable.

The census reports all have a useful index to place names in England & Wales, showing districts & sub-districts:

The indexes can be navigated by directly editing the url, as detailed above.