Birth/Death Records

Governments keep these public records for several reasons the fact is it is almost essential that governments kept birth and death records years ago so they knew how to best distribute tax money people rarely moved far away from where they were born so these records were a very good indication of population levels in different areas. It was also important to see which departments of health were not doing a very good job, measuring death rates in the industrial revolution lead to many important sanitary and living condition changes in the UK for example as these records were used to set up compulsory health boards, something which was otherwise a permissive legislation when it was first introduced in the UK.

Now in most countries birth and death records are considered to be publically available in most cases straight away to the next of kin and in many cases to the general public although there are some cases of the records not being available until 25-50 years after the person the public records relate to is deceased. Keeping these records is also beneficial for anybody who is interested in finding out anything about their families past. It is becoming increasingly easy to trace family histories due to the increase in quality that these records are being kept with.

Generally in most countries these public records are being kept by departments of health and are considered freely available there are rarely any serious restrictions on them as there is very little information that could ever be considered sensitive in them except for perhaps the cause of death which could be personal or be cause for police investigation.

Birth and death records are generally the oldest public records kept that are freely available in most countries perhaps with the exception of documents like the Hansard and political transcriptions which were deemed highly important.

It seems common place that Birth/Records are being requested with growing frequency as more and more people strive to find their roots, something about modern society has tweaked an interest in people. The interest may be hard to trace, but the fact that tracing your family has never been easier is mostly thanks to worldwide liberalisation on public records. This of course seems to have come about at an alarming rate in the last 30 years throughout the western world. And it looks like this wide spread liberalisation will only continue to grow.