Birth Certificate

[darmstadt]

As I recall, to get a copy of your birth certificate you had to go to the town hall where you were born and registered with some official paperwork, i.e. passport and they would give you a copy. I now need a copy (the last one seems to have done a Lucan) but living abroad makes it somewhat difficult to go to (cough cough) Chelmsford. Is there anyway I can do this another way, search the I'net and RTFM'ed but no answers there?

[SueEllen]

Found this:
http://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/or...--and--pay.asp

Some of the pages on the side may help you.

[NotAllThere]

That's what I used when I the birth certificates and marriage certificate disappeared during a house move.

[PAH]

What if you lost all your paperwork, say in a fire? They just take your word for it or do you have to produce a relative and their docs?

We keep hearing in the news about how people obtain fake IDs, usually by getting a birth certificate of someone deceased. Is it so easy as filling in a form and sending it off?

[SueEllen]

We keep hearing in the news about how people obtain fake IDs, usually by getting a birth certificate of someone deceased. Is it so easy as filling in form and sending it off?

Yes.

Well it was last time I had to get a copy of my birth certificate in person and asking other people they say the same thing.

They've just made it more difficult using your birth certificate as ID as rarely is it accepted as ID for anything unless you are under 18.

[darmstadt]

Thanks a lot for that, exactly what I needed.

[shaunbhoy]

Just write them a nice letter asking for a new one. Nobody that was not 100% genuine would fess up to being born in Chelmsford.

HTH

[r0bly0ns]

I was told the same by the passport office when I lost my british birth certificate (British citizen born in South Africa), that I had to apply in person, with my father, to Liverpool and bring in the passport I was brought into the country on.

So I never bothered

Years later when I was registering the birth of my little un, I mentioned it to the registrar, and she gave me a phone number to call.

I phoned them, and one over the phone switch card payment of 12 quid later a new one was in the post and I was able to get a passport

Get in touch with your place of births local Birth registrar and they should be able to point you in the right direction.

[Lucifer Box]

Frederick Forsyth can tell you all about it

This is, of course, the basis of the plot of Day of the Jackal (pub 1972) and is still the case today.

There was a programme on last year about it. The reporting journo asked for a copy of Frederick Forsyth's birth certificate from the appropriate registrar, got it, and used it to obtain a UK passport in the name of Frederick Forsyth. They then confronted the man himself over dinner with a friend in a restaurant Watchdog style as if it was all his fault for highlighting the loophole in the first place. He was rather bemused and somewhat annoyed, unsurprisingly.

[PAH]

Explains why there's so many numpties with my name on FaceBook, yet I've never met anyone with even the same surname (outside my family!) in real life.

Though I did once get mistaken for the ex-husband of some bint that visited the office I was contracting at. She even came over asking what I was doing there. Apparently I was a spitting image, which took me back a bit. I never even asked if she fancied a 'trip down memory lane' I was so stunned.

Maybe one day I'll wake up all Jason Bourne style, or my parents have yet to tell me about my long lost twin brother, who also seems to have the same lack of luck with his women.