The Civil Register of Births Marriages and Death

You can find births, deaths and marriages records from 1837, when civil registration was introduced by law, at the local record offices and also at the Family History Centre in London.

The FHC indices are alphabetical in quarter years, so that the March 1880 index, for instance, will include events between 1st January and 31st March in that year. If a search is confined to names, dates and places from these indices the same transcription principles as above apply, even though you have less items of data and you are working from a secondary or tertiary (compiled) record rather than from a photographic film of the original. So you can still adopt a routine system, with columns for each item, and allowing in this case a number of records on a pre-printed page.

The parish registers continued in parallel with the new civil records, of course, but the latter offers a more complete and perhaps more reliable record.