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Do birth certificates from 1700's to 1900's always show mother's maiden name? Ive noticed that the registers before about 1920 or thereabouts dont show much at all so its very difficult to find the mothers/wives maiden names. Is there any other way besides paying lots of money for certs.? Any help appreciated.

For England and Wales, there are no birth certificates before mid-1837. (And there sometimes are not for a while after that, because registration was not compulsory at first.)

So for the 1700s to 1837 (and before the 1700s), you are having to look for parish records. Most commonly, they only recorded the mother's given name. In very early records in some cases, they only recorded the father's name. Practices varied, from what I can tell.

The mother's birth surname only began to be recorded in the *index* for England and Wales in mid-1911. The index itself exists from mid-1837, when registration started, but the mother's birth surname was not copied into the index until that later date.

Editing: barring unusual cases, the mother's birth surname will be stated on certificates post-1837. But it is not *always* reliable. A woman might enter her first married surname, or stepfather's surname or the like, just as people tended to do for father's name on marriage certificates when they didn't know or hadn't been told the gospel truth.

One fairly good way to find the mother's surname is to find the marriage.

At FreeBMD you can search for marriages using any combination of the four names:

surname
given name
spouse's surname
spouse's given name

For example, you can search for John Smith married Mary. Or Mary married John Smith. Using a date range that you think will capture the marriage, and a county or even district if you are positive. If your names aren't actually Mary Jones and John Smith, you have a good chance of finding it. Before 1911, of course, you can't be positive which person married which without the certificate.

For births and marriages before 1901, you can then try to confirm your hypothesis by looking for a couple in a census. If the wife's given name and birth place and date details are at all distinctive, try searching for her in an earlier census by those details and see whether a result matches up with the surname you have in mind.

At the other end, if you have a marriage before 1911 but expect there to be births after 1911, try searching for children, with the surname and the possible wife's surname as mother's surname on the birth.

But everybody will say: the certficate is the only "proof". But then, it's just proof of what it says, and not of who those people really were anyhow, lol.

One last thing: keep an eye on FreeREG.

http://www.freereg.org.uk/

The project to transcribe all parish BMD records in the UK. If the mother's name is in the record, it will be included in the search results there. Coverage at the moment is very spotty ... and of course we should all sign up for volunteer transcribing ...

Thanks for the help everyone. Im actually looking for anything about my grandfather who was born in 1910 but was apparently illegitimate. He may have been born in Galway Ireland and then he came to the UK. I dont know whether he took his mothers name because the father was left behind etc. I cant find much on him. His name was William Henry Carey and his mothers name was Kathleen. I have his marriage and death records later on but nothing about his ancestors etc.

Ah. Ireland. Good luck with that!

If you have his marriage certificate and it doesn't state a father's name ... his mother may have been the only one who knew.