Legal Identity & Civil Registration

The register kept at Givry is the earliest surviving vital record register in France. It predates any national requirement and shows that parish-level recording of births, marriages and burials existed long before the state took an interest.

English parishes were placed under a statutory obligation to record marriages, births and burials. The duty rested with the established churches and would be transferred to civil authorities more than a century later.

As part of wider legislation on the policing of church benefices, Francis I required local church institutions, mainly parishes, to maintain registers of vital events. This made France the first country to establish a nationwide population register, built on the records of the Catholic Church.

Sweden became the second country with a nationwide population register, compiled by the Church of Sweden for the crown. Recording of births and deaths was stipulated in the early 17th century, giving Sweden one of the longest and most comprehensive suites of civil records of any country.

The act transferred the statutory duty of recording marriages, births and burials from the established churches to the civil authorities, with a justice of the peace rather than the parish priest required to maintain a register. It was the first introduction of civil registration in England and Wales.

With the restitution of the monarchy the civil registration duty was abolished and reverted to the established churches. Civil registration in England and Wales would not return for nearly two centuries.

Sweden instituted regular formal national censuses alongside its church-based vital registration. Combined with the earlier register, this produced an unusually deep and continuous body of population records.

By order of the Republic, civil registration was removed from church control and vested in the state. The secular model established here was exported across Europe under French rule.

Before French rule the Netherlands had no central registration of its population. The French introduced registration in some parts of the country, beginning the Dutch transition to a state-run civil register.

Australia introduced compulsory registration of vital events from the middle of the nineteenth century. It has maintained continuous compulsory civil registration since.

Civil registries were introduced during the Russian occupation and followed the Tsarist practice of keeping them together with church records. This was the first systematic civil registration in the territory.

Registration introduced piecemeal from 1796 was made nationwide in 1811. This established the territorial completeness on which all later Dutch registration systems were built.

The act re-established civil registration in England and Wales after nearly two centuries of church control. It created the statutory basis for a national register of births, marriages and deaths.

A central registry office was established to administer the registration of births, marriages and deaths, which became compulsory from 1 July 1837. This institutional model of a general register office was widely copied across the English-speaking world.

Spain's first civil registers were set up in the big and medium-sized cities of the country. They were the forerunner of the universal municipal system established three decades later.

From 1 April 1845 Protestant marriages in Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom, had to be civilly registered. Full registration of all births, marriages and deaths followed two decades later.

From 1 January 1850 every Dutch municipality had to maintain a bound population register of its residents. This created a continuous local record of residence as well as vital events.

Scotland introduced its own system of civil registration of births, deaths and marriages, separate from that of England and Wales. It remains governed by later legislation including the Registration of Births, Deaths and Marriages (Scotland) Act 1965.

The Communal Law of 31 March 1864 transferred record keeping to the mayor of each dwelling locality, who could delegate the task to a helper. This localised and secularised civil registration in Romania.

From 1 January 1864 all vital events in Ireland, regardless of denomination, had to be civilly registered. This completed the extension of the British registration system across the whole United Kingdom.

On 1 January 1871 civil registration was extended to every Spanish municipality, superseding the limited urban registers of 1841. This is the foundation of the Spanish civil register as it exists today.

A separate register for the Royal Family was created two years after the general municipal system. It still exists today alongside the ordinary civil register.

From 1875 those present at a birth or death were legally required to report the event to the registrar. This shifted registration from a passive to an actively enforced duty and sharply improved completeness.

The EGR ZAGS began operations on 1 October 2018 under the Federal Tax Service. It consolidated Russian civil status records into a single national digital register.

Namibia introduced electronic birth notification, supported by at least 22 birth registration offices located inside hospital maternity wards. Siting registration at the point of delivery is a leading method for raising birth registration coverage.

The municipal personal records database was superseded by the basisregistratie personen in 2015. The successor system continued the municipally maintained digital register of persons.

The non-governmental organisation iCivil Africa has been deploying a centralised civil registration and vital statistics system in Burkina Faso since 2015. It is an example of NGO-led registration infrastructure in a low-registration country.

The World Health Statistics Quarterly found that roughly 1 per cent of estimated deaths in low-income groups and about 9 per cent in lower-middle-income groups were registered. The finding quantified the global death-registration gap that underlies poor vital statistics in much of the world.

The Directorate-General for Registries and Notary was reorganised into the Instituto dos Registos e Notariado. This is the form in which the Portuguese civil registry exists today.

From 1 December 2007 registrars and superintendent registrars became local authority employees for the first time. The change restructured the administration of the English and Welsh registration service.

From 1 January 2005 anyone over 14 had to produce official identification when asked by a mandated person, despite the practice being widely considered un-Dutch. Official identification also became required for all important transactions between citizens and government.

The hojeok, a household register written with the same Chinese characters as the Japanese koseki, was repealed in 2005. It was abolished on 1 January 2008 and replaced with the Family Relations Register system, shifting the unit of registration from household to individual.

Responsibility for Swedish civil registration passed from the Church of Sweden to Skatteverket, the tax agency. This completed the secularisation of a register that had been church-administered since 1631.

During the 1990s every local Dutch registry was computerised. From 1 October 1994 the individual registration card was replaced by a digital record in the gemeentelijke basisadministratie van persoonsgegevens, kept at municipal level.

Article 16 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women obliges states to establish compulsory civil registration of marriages. It made marriage registration an international legal obligation rather than merely a domestic administrative practice.

The 1965 Act and subsequent legislation govern Scottish civil registration. Responsibility for it has since been devolved to the Scottish Parliament.

Until the 1960s birth certificates were written by hand in a styled cursive calligraphy on security paper, often illegible to later generations. After the 1960s they were issued typed by machine, and later computer-printed on standardised security paper carrying identification numbers such as Mexico's CURP.

The Conservatória dos Registos Centrais was set up to handle registrations involving Portuguese citizens overseas and to manage citizenship procedures. It gave the civil registration system extraterritorial reach over the diaspora.

Established on 22 December 1945, the Directorate-General oversaw civil, property, commercial and motor vehicle registration as well as notary services. It was reformed in 2007 into the Institute of Registries and Notaries.

The Dutch government had declined to mandate identity documents in 1940, but the occupying authorities imposed them to assess who could be sent to Germany as forced labour and to identify Jewish citizens. The episode is the canonical illustration of how a comprehensive population register can be turned against the people it records.

The move from household books toward individual registration came with the persoonskaart, a single card per person kept in the municipality. It marked the shift to the individual as the unit of registration.

A state effort to collect early records ran from around 1926 to 1932, with some cases continuing as late as 1948–1952. A good number of these early records were lost in the process, sometimes literally by the truckload.

Metricheskiye knigi, the church parish registers, were superseded by state acts of civil status in 1918. All registers predating this change are now open to everyone.

The Law of Separation of the Church from the State of 20 April 1911 radicalised the secular state and gave civil effect to all prior baptism, marriage and death records. Parish registers were physically transferred to newly established Civil Registry Offices.

The Civil Registry Code of 18 February 1911 formally created Portugal's civil registry, a few months before the promulgation of the republican constitution. It remains the basis of the institution now known as the Institute of Registries and Notaries.

The Masonic Civil Registry Association was presented by its mentors as a strong anti-clerical and antireligious stronghold. Its campaign prefigured the secularisation of Portuguese registration after the republican revolution.