When researching your family tree, how do you get birth records on line?

Question:

When researching your family tree, how do you get birth records on line?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: It depends...

Birth records are protected by privacy laws in most countries. In the US they're private for 72 years from the person's date of birth. In Great Britain they're protected for 100 years, as I believe they are in Canada, too. Other countries are similar. If the records you want are more recent than that, only the parent or the person him/herself can get copies of them unless you have a copy of a death certificate and can prove you are a legitimate heir of the person.

If the records you want are in the US and older than 72 years, it's hit and miss whether you can find them online. Only the county clerks have possession of the records and they make significant money selling copies of the records. Putting the records onlline for free would cut out that profit. They strongly resist doing it. And there are states where it's not permitted to post birth certificate information. Where the information is published, the best place to find it is the USGenWeb site for that county. http://www.usgenweb.org

You'll also find that there are several wonderful volunteers at the various GenWeb sites who are more than happy to go pull birth certificate information for you (they can't photocopy for you, but can write it down). Or if you pay for a genealogy copy of the birth certificate that you want, they can get it and send it to you.

Also, most states in the US didn't keep birth certificates at all before 1870 and didn't require them until 1925-1930. There was a registration fee attached to birth certificates and many families couldn't afford to pay it. So births weren't registered.

In other countries, births weren't recorded until civil registers were kept. Spain, Italy, the US and others didn't start keeping these until the 1870s. The Netherlands, parts of Germany, Switzerland and others started keeping them a little earlier, but not much.

If the records you want are in the Netherlands, they are online (except for Amsterdam where they're not online at all) at http://www.genlias.nl

If the records you want are from Quebec, they're only consistently recorded by the Catholic Church and have only been archived up to 1799. They're in the PRDH database at the Universite de Montreal website.

BMD records in Great Britain are available at a few sites from 1837 on (that being the year that England and Wales started keeping civil registers). Here are a couple of decent sites: http://www.uk-bmd.org.uk/bmd-part1.html...
http://www.bmdindex.co.uk/info.htm...

Hope this helps a little...