Birth place and baptism

[johnd3]

Hi
After  searching a few years for my greatgrand father,s birth in Lancashire a John Duffy born in 1873/ 1874, found him on the census,s 1881 1891 1901 which said he was born in Bolton Lanc, when i applied for his birth cert at Bolton reg office they could not find him.
When i looked at Lancashire BMD indexes i found a John Duffy born in 1874 it gave the mothers maiden name as MCROWEN his mothers name should be McKeown could it have ben transcribed incorrectly?.Also in the index it gave a sub-district as Oswaldtwistle is this the place he would be born or just the birth reg district, also the registers are held at Preston.
They were catholics and came from Ireland in about 1872/73.
Where would Lancashire BMD  get their info from to create the bmd index?.
Many thanks for any help
John Duffy

[mshrmh]

Hi John & welcome to RootsChat.

LancashireBMD is compiled by volunteers from the original registers held at the local register offices. Some (as in your case) have allowed mother's maiden name to be added to the local index before the date at which it was added to national GRO index, which can be quite useful. The transcription looks as though the hand-writing was hard to decipher but plausible from McKeown - which if your ancestor wasn't literate would have been spelled according to how the registrar thought....

From the full GRO index on FreeBMD it seems that the birth is one of those where the registration district was Blackburn which at the time covered these places:
http://www.ukbmd.org.uk/genuki/reg/districts/blackburn.html
one of which was Oswaldtwistle.

If you want a copy of the certificate you can use the form from LancashireBMD to apply to the local office. You can add a note to the form for other information (eg parents' names) you might then get a copy that is "photocopy style" from the original as some offices can do this.

If you apply to the GRO you'll need to put in something as a check with their there being more than one birth in that name in the same period.

Modified for spelling - oops 

[johnd3]

Hi
Many thanks for that info to mshrmh regarding birth and baptism for my grandfather.
Another question i would like to ask is when a child was born how long did the parents have before they had to register the child?.
Many thanks for any help
John Duffy

[mshrmh]

John - the answer usually given is 6 weeks after the birth. Stan Mapstone is an expert on the law in this area over time - if you search around you may find a post of his which gives the definitive answer.

However it wasn't unknown for a birth to be registered late (though probably fairly unusual by this time) - there have been posts from other RootsChatters who've found this - with a baptism or other evidence that shows it to be the same child, but say, registered a quarter late. There are provisions for late registration but some parents seem to have used a later date of birth than the true one to avoid any penalties when registering the birth.