How reliable is the information about our ancestors in the 1939 Register?
QFor the past 20 years, I have been researching my ancestry, but on my paternal side I can’t get any further back than my father’s name. I can’t even find a birth certificate for him, so I accessed the 1939 Register to try to find out his date of birth. This I achieved, but even with this information I still could not get a birth certificate.
What I would like to know is, when the forms were filled out to obtain an ID card in 1939, was the information given confirmed in any way by the issuing department to prove the identity of the person applying for the card?
John Roberts
Amissing birth may often be found by considering alternative names, places or years for the registration, or by investigating the possibility of adoption, but there has always been a small number of births that did go unregistered. Without details of your father, I can’t investigate that further.
The exercise of National Registration, which we now call the 1939 Register, was undertaken on 29 September 1939 shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War, and was vitally important for the issue of identity cards and ration books. As such, it was perhaps done more thoroughly than a census would be, and extra efforts were made to ensure the whole population would be counted, with a few exceptions such as those already serving in the armed forces.
The responsibility for completing the schedules lay with the head of each household or “other responsible person”. The enumerator’s role was not just to collect the forms; they were also required to check the schedule had been completed properly, and to issue ID cards from the information given. However, they were not required to confirm the information by examining other evidence, such as birth certificates, which many people may not have had easy access to.
I have looked at many entries in the 1939 Register and compared them to the birth certificates of the individuals concerned, and it is clear from the many discrepancies that there was no such check in place.
A talk on how the register was compiled, by the very knowledgeable Audrey Collins of The National Archives, is available on TNA’s website at bit.ly/TNAtalk1939Register. There’s also a fascinating recreation of the broadcast to the population on the night that the register was taken at bit. ly/TNA1939broadcast, which included instructions on how to calculate your own year of birth for anyone who was unsure. Antony Marr