MaryB wrote:The best certificate I have ever bought is a death cert for 1928 in Australia. It tells you how long the person has been in Australia, all the childrens names and their ages, even the ones who have died, and what age they died at, spouse name and if she is desceased or alive - parents names
Mary
Which may or may not be connected with the fact that that's virtually identical with a Scottish death register entry from 1855
Although the Victorian state registration system predated the Scottish system by several years, the 1854 Act which introduced civil registration in Scotland in 1855 was something like the 7th or 8th Bill to be presented to parliament over the preceding two decades. In other words the authorities in Scotland had been addressing this subject long before 1855, and consulted widely with, among others, GRO in London, the (now Royal) Statistical Society in London, the major life insurance companies who had an obvious major actuarial interest, the French equivalent to GROS, and others. In other words, they must have had a clear idea of the format wished for the registers long before 1855.
A senior actuary in one of the London life insurance companies and an active member of the Statistical Society emigrated to Victoria in the late 1840s, and some time later, after the initial polical appointee had been dismissed, became the Registrar General for Victoria.
Coincidence
I don't really know, as, to date, I've been unable to find anything in Australian national archives in Canberra or state archives in Adelaide which proves the link, and I'm done considerable digging, albeit at a distance and often via third parties.
But it just has to be one heckuva coincidence that the contents of the Victorian BMDs, not just death records, virtually mirror those of Scotland's 1855 format, - and then there's the NZ similarity
David
but I notice on several occasions that folk talk about 1855 being a great year for Scottish folk doing family history. Can some kind soul please tell this Aussie lady, is she right in guessing that the certificates from this year have more info or another reason ???????????????
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