ABSTRACT
Prior to 1836, parish churches’ baptismal and burial registers provide the nearest approximation to a national record of the mortal passage. The Registration Act of 1836 1 (applying to England and Wales only) established a system of civil registration under a Registrar General, with a national network of superintendent and local registrars. The object of the Act was primarily to collect statistics, a fundamental tool for the emerging lobby in public health matters; it was not intended as an aid to the detection of foul play. Birth registration was not even compulsory under the Act; while the obligation to register deaths, in a curious roundabout way, only applied at the point of burial, not at the time of death itself; and this was to be crucial in assisting the concealment of deaths under suspicious circumstances. Under s.27 a burial could only take place if the person in charge of the funeral received a registrar’s burial certificate from the bereaved. However, the burial could legally take place without the certificate so long as the person conducting the funeral notified the registrar within seven days.
