Family history

Staff at the registration offices will be pleased to help with any enquiry concerning the registration of births, deaths, marriages and civil partnerships.  They can produce copies of certificates from any register in their custody. Official records of births, deaths, marriages and civil partnerships in England and Wales began on the 1st of July 1837. For the purpose of registering births, deaths, marriages and civil partnerships the country is divided into registration districts.  Buckinghamshire has two main registration offices, in Aylesbury and High Wycombe.

Applying for certificates

Please go to Copy certificates page for details - please note this service is temporarily unavailable until 6pm on 6th December. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Please allow 28 days for us to produce historical certificates.

Information on costs and fees  

If you don't have all the correct information

Information can be obtained from the General Register Office Indexes, where names are recorded alphabetically throughout each quarter of each year. These indexes will provide you with dates and registration districts. 

This information can be found at the Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies, via the web pages below. This information can also be researched online.

Certificates will be issued in good faith and to the best of our ability with the information provided by you.

Helping us to help you

Please include as much useful information as possible. The parish, village or town in which an event occurred is much more useful than the district. This is equally true for marriage searches - many districts can cover over 100 parishes, that could mean 100 marriage indexes to manually search, not forgetting the Register Office index.

Try to keep your request relevant - sometimes we receive long letters explaining many aspects of your family history in great detail. This serves only to slow down our search. We just need to know the event that you are looking for, the date it occurred and any other names which may appear in the entry, for example, mother's and father's name.

The reference number shown on the records of the General Register Office indexes, unfortunately do not help us at all. Our records are indexed totally differently.

Please include a daytime contact number or email address - sometimes we need to check a small detail with you before issuing the certificate.