The Civil Registration of births, marriages and deaths began on 1 July 1837.  This did not affect the recording of baptisms and burials, which are entirely separate event but meant that marriage registers became, in effect, state records.  As such they were not, until recently, available for copying to the general public and Record Offices were not allowed to sell copies of their microfilms of marriage registers. As it is, the Georgeham marriage records after 1837 have not been filmed; with the move towards the digitisation of records it now seems unlikely that this will ever happen.

While the recording of marriages was fairly straightforward the same could not be said of births and deaths.  Until 1875 it was the responsibility of the local registrar to track down these events and, not surprisingly, many will have been unrecorded.  From 1875 the onus was turned on the public* to report to the Registrar, with penalties for failure to do so within six weeks of the event.

*Except for those in the hands of a coroner