1939 Register

[Kit]

When this came into being was there a lot of public resistance?

I have a lot of family who are lying about their DOBs, so somehow they were not providing proof, or it was not required.

Some are minor lies ie born Dec 1900 say, but saying Dec 1901. Others are strange and without other family members around I would not know they are mine.

[Merry]

Proof of dob can't have been a requirement as (as you say) there are too many people telling fibs or who perhaps didn't know what was on their birth certificate or had never been registered.

When you submitted your registration information you were issued with an Identity Card which had to be carried at all times and also, of you did not register you would not be in receipt of a ration book for food, clothes, fuel etc etc. So, if you didn't register you might find yourself in difficult circumstances. No doubt there were people who still refused though!!

I looked in the FMP newspaper collection for 'The National Register' and 'false information'. I saw a report about a man being fined 40s (£2) for giving a false surname (that of his common law wife). I wondered how the authorities found out? Most references to false information in the papers were dated before 29 Sept and I found no specific references to what the punishment would be for either non-registration or false information given.

[Phoenix]

It has never been a legal requirement to keep the name you were born with. Anybody habitually known by another name would then have a birth certificate wich did not tally (Best Mate's grandmother ditched all her first names in favour of ones of her own choosing. We discounted her birth details for years, as they were in the "wrong" name)

I imagine that the administrative difficulties of proving that all people's details were correct would be just too challenging. Probably the only significant date would be when people reached pensionable age. I should think that children's details would be likely to be correct, as parents had probably kept the birth certificates.

[kiterunner]

In many cases, I don't think people were lying about their date of birth (or the dob of someone else in their household), but miscalculating the year.

[Merry]

Originally Posted by kiterunner

In many cases, I don't think people were lying about their date of birth (or the dob of someone else in their household), but miscalculating the year.

Yes, not helped by the way people often seemed to describe themselves or others as being in their (number of years) year, so if you were in your 20th year you would be 19 and a bit, not 20.

[Margaret in Burton]

My granny has her date of birth listed as 18th Oct 1881 when in fact she was born in 1880. All other members of the family have the correct date of birth.

[Merry]

And my granny has 8 Nov 1895, altered to 1896 and then altered again to 1898, but her birth year was 1892! In her case there was some lying!!

[Phoenix]

My Great Aunt's husband was 42 in 1921, and 49 in 1939. He appears to have had a birthday that wobbled between 6 and 12 July.

Not sure why he pretended to be so muc younger than he was: she knew perfectly well ow old he was.

[Olde Crone]

My 3 x ggm knocked 13 years off her age when she married her third husband and kept it up till she died, at which point her daughter gave the correct age to the registrar! I've often mused over whether her husband wondered why they didn't have any children, or how she had managed to have her eldest child at the age of six, lol, or perhaps he wasn't much good at arithmetic.

Didn't we once conclude on here that the Navy Service records always changed the birth year to the one before, for unknown reasons?

I also think that people weren't obsessed with age and celebrating their birthdays, so it was often just a guess, not actually a lie, there wasn't anything to gain from a lie as far as National Registration was concerned.

OC

[Merry]

Didn't we once conclude on here that the Navy Service records always changed the birth year to the one before, for unknown reasons?

Yes - I don't know that it's always, but certainly extremely often!