Why can’t I find Rebecca’s death certificate?
Q
My 4x great grandmother, Rebecca Pitman, married George Goodey on 15 January 1797 in Plumstead, Greenwich, south-east London.
According to the parish burial register, George was buried on 11 July 1828 at St Mary Magdalene, Woolwich, and his address at the time of death was Myrtle Place. Rebecca was buried on 23 December 1840 at the same church and with the same address, but I cannot find her death registration anywhere.
I have read that after civil registration was introduced in 1837, a burial could not take place without a death certificate, so why am I having trouble locating one? Sonia Deschacht
A
Deaths can be notoriously difficult to locate because so many different factors can impinge on our expectations of where and when the death should have been registered. Some people died away from home, while others had their names or ages recorded incorrectly, often because the person registering the death did not have accurate knowledge about the deceased.
The General Register Office Death Index is divided into quarters, and deaths had to be registered within eight days at the time that George and Rebecca died. This was changed to five days from 1875. However, if someone died at the tail end of a quarter (March, June, September or December) their death might have been registered in the following quarter. But in Rebecca’s case there does appear to be no registration for her.
You are correct in saying that at this time a burial should not have taken place without the production of a death certificate. However, there are exceptions to every rule. Rebecca’s death took place in the very early years of civil registration, and it is evident that some burials did take place without the required documentation. This was partly because people failed to understand the new procedures, but also because there was a good deal of hostility from the clergy towards civil registration in its early years, perhaps because they feared civil registration was a threat to the fees they received whenever someone was buried in consecrated ground. Some were, therefore, quite prepared to carry out burials without seeing the death certificate.
From 1875 the law surrounding death certificates was tightened up, and a certificate could only be issued once the death had been certified by a doctor or after a coroner’s inquest. Despite this, there are cases of certificates being issued without either authority in the years immediately after 1875 and occasionally much later. Celia Heritage