familytreemagazine.com 631939 Register for England & Wales
1 The registration
district and sub-district
fi eld can help you track
down other records
from the area. Take
information from the
birth and marital status
(“S, M, W, or D”) columns
to look for civil registra-
tion records.2 The Register was used
to produce civilians’
wartime identity cards
and issue ration books,
beginning in January- The government
also used the Register
in military deploy-
ments and population
evacuations. Details in
the document include
names, addresses,
genders, dates of birth,
marital statuses and
occupations.
3 The government used
the Register to docu-
ment changes in name
or address. As a result,
you’ll see amendments
to entries, such as name
changes or notes about
dates of death. Here,
we see that Marjorie
Sissons remarried and
changed her surname
to Anderson.4 The See Instructions
column includes several
types of notes, such as
those from the National
Health Service. In this
case, 28-12-90 indicates
Marjorie Anderson
(née Sissons) died on
December 28, 1990.
You can follow up to
order a civil registration
death record.George G. Morgan is
a genealogy speaker and
author. He also cohosts the
Genealogy Guys podcast
with Drew Smith <www.
genealogyguys.com>.DOCUMENT DETECTIVE
tip
Given privacy restrictions and record loss to the
United Kingdom’s offi cial censuses, the 1939
Register serves as an important census substitute.
It covers just England and Wales, and does not
include the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man.
A separate registration covers Scotland.5 Information has
been redacted
(blacked out) for
people who’re still living
to protect their privacy.
The version of the
1939 Re gis ter at
Ancestry.co.uk will
update annually to
show records that
have been opened
during the past year. 5
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