A note on the under-registration of births in Britain in the nineteenth century

In this note an attempt has been made to estimate the incompleteness of birth registration in Great Britain in the first decades of civil registration. For Scotland, registration appears to have been reasonably complete after 1861. For England and Wales, however, there seems to have been a considerable initial deficiency, with a consistent improvement over time and no sudden change following the 1874 amending Act. The estimates given in this note suggest that, to allow for under-registration in England and Wales, registered births should be multiplied by a factor of about 1.094 for the period 1841-5, the factor falling steadily to 1.o by 1880. It should be emphasized that the methods of estimation used in this note are indirect and the results very approximate. In the view of the writer, the estimates tend in general to be somewhat too low, especially for the earlier part of the period covered.