The 1939 Register for England & Wales : TheGenealogist (2024)

TheGenealogist’s well known brick wall shattering search tools include the ability to find your ancestorin 1939 byusing keywords, such as the individual’soccupation or their date of birth. You can also search for anaddress and then jump straight to thehousehold. If you’re struggling to find a family, you can even searchusing asmany of theirforenames as you know.

Once you’ve found a record in the 1939 Register, you can click on the street name to view all theresidents on thestreet, potentially finding relatives living nearby.

TheGenealogist’s innovative SmartSearch technology enables you to discover even moreabout a person,linking to theirBirth, Marriage and Death records.

The 1939 Register is a very important and useful record set that is made all the more important by thefact that the1931 census for England and Wales was destroyed by fire during the Second World War, and no census wasactuallytaken in 1941 because of the war. Allied to the powerful search strengths of TheGenealogist, the 1939Register,therefore, provides us with the most complete survey of the population of England and Wales between 1921and 1951,which makes it an invaluable resource for all family, social and local historians.

Searching the 1939 Register Online

The 1939 Register can often reveal to you important additional information about yourancestors thatwill help build your family’s story. Individuals, for example, are listed with their full dates ofbirth. This is ahuge benefit that the1939 Register has over the census, which simply lists the age of a person.

Married Names Added

An additional benefit of the information contained in the 1939 Register is that thesurnames ofwomen were regularly updated upon their marriage because the Register continued to be updated until 1951and then,after this, by the NHS from its inception in 1948 until they began to transfer their records tocomputers in 1991.This means that you can search for your female family members listed by both their maiden and marriednames in thisdata.

Living people under 100 years of age were redacted from this database due to therequirement ofmeeting privacy rules. However, Each year TheGenealogist will update the database with the latestunredactedrecords.

Background

In September 1939, war clouds had gathered across Europe with Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland. On the3rd of themonth; just two days later, Britain declared war on the belligerent regime. The British government foundthemselvesin a national emergency that would require the collection of information on its people without delay.

The wholesale conscription of men into the services had to be planned for, along with the introduction ofrationbooks to feed all the populace when the enemy would be expected to interfere with the supplies destinedto an islandnation such as Britain.

This called immediately for an updated list of all the population... and it couldn’t wait for the nextcensusscheduled for 1941.

The solution was to carry out a survey of all the citizens on the 29th September 1939 and create what weknow todayas the1939 Register. The resulting roll would provide the authorities with a snapshot of thecivilianinhabitants of England and Wales just after the outbreak of the Second World War and it is now ofimmense use tofamily historians seeking to build our family tree.

The information gathered for the 1939 Register was not simply for the authorities to use whileadministeringconscription and, once rationing was introduced in January 1940, to issue ration books.

National Registration Identity Cards

Details gathered and recorded in the Register were also essential for the Government to issue identitycards for thepopulation, as well as to plan the direction of labour. They were also used by the authorities when themonitor andcontrol of the movement of the public became necessary at the time that military mobilisation and massevacuationbegan to happen.

The massive survey that was undertaken to create the 1939 Register was intended todocument theparticulars of every member of the civilian population on a specific date and ascribe them a number.Militarypersonnel were not recorded in this process as the registration of members of the armed forces was dealtwithseparately by the military authorities. While the1939 Register, therefore, does not include service personnel who were either in army,naval and airforce establishments on the 29th September, or even members of the forces who were resident or visitingtheir ownhome at the time, it does record people who would go on to later serve in the armed forces. The reasonfor thisbeing that compulsory enlistment was actually only to begin in October of that year.

For each individual person the following details are recorded:

• address
• schedule number
• sub number
• surname
• first name(s)
• role (for institutions only – Officer, Visitor, Servant, Patient, Inmate)
• gender
• date of birth
• marital status
• occupation

While the 1939 Register is not a census, it is arranged along similar lines and includes similar, if lessdetailed,information. It does, however, show exact dates of birth where census returns simply give a person’sage.

The civilian population

• These records do include the civilian populations of:
  • England
  • Wales
• These records do not, however, include the civilian populations of:
  • Channel Islands
  • Isle of Man
  • Scotland
  • Northern Ireland
• The records do include
  • members of the armed forces on leave
  • civilians on military bases

How the Register was compiled and arranged

Information is arranged by:

• enumeration district – each enumeration district has a unique four- or five-letter code, and largeenumerationdistricts may comprise of more than one book
• household or institution – each household or institution is represented by a schedule number. Alargeinstitution such as a hospital may be an enumeration district in its own right
• national registration number – each person is represented by a sub-number within the household orinstitution

When preparing the Register, the General Register Office used the plans already in place for what wouldhave been the1941 Census. It was based on registration districts and sub-districts, and was administered bySuperintendentRegistrars and Registrars of Births and Deaths.

The enumeration districts used for the Register were based broadly on those used for the 1931 Census,adjusted toaccount for the population movements since 1931. They were subdivided into smaller units for NationalRegistrationpurposes. The general rule was that an enumeration district should contain no more than 300 households,not countinginstitutions.

The final arrangement of the Register was not by registration district, as in a census, but according totheboundaries of local government units. These were the bodies responsible for the Local NationalRegistration Officesand Food Offices, who maintained and updated information in the Register. These were County Boroughs,MunicipalBoroughs, Urban Districts and Rural Districts, except in London which was made up of MetropolitanBoroughs and theCities of London and Westminster.