Birth Certificate Replacement

From here you can safely purchase a full legal Birth Certificate Replacement, suitable for both legal and family history uses. These certificates include parents details, which is often referred to as a Long-Form or A4 version.

For your protection, Vital Certificates Ltd is a registered organisation under the UK Data Protection Act (DPA).

Choose:

Duplicate British Birth Certificates are often essential to prove identity when applying for:

For full details of excatly what is included on a British Birth Certificate, please visit our Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) page.

Where British nationals are born abroad, we can additionally supply copies of certificates relating to any UK births abroad registered at a Consulate, High Commission, or with the Armed Forces. This service only applies to those births that have actually been registered with the UK authorities. Please note that it can take up to 18 months for the records to reach the UK from the overseas authorities so requests for recent births would need to be made to the specific in-country birth registrations department.

For overseas clients needing to validate the authenticity of the certificate as having been produced in the UK, we also offer a legalisation service whereby the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office will attach a dated Apostille to the reverse of the certificate. This is sometimes known as Attestation and is carried out by a Notary Public.We would always recommend that clients check with the relevant authority as to whether this is necessary for their purposes.

If you have any further questions that aren't covered within our FAQ section, please feel free to call or email us. Details can be found in the Contact Us section.

Further Information

We supply official Birth Certificate replacements from the long-form version archived at the time of the birth registration. Any birth recorded within England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland can be re-issued, along with births that occurred outside the United Kingdom but were registered with the appropriate UK authority within the country of birth. These would include Armed Forces, Consular, High Commission or Embassy registrations.

All birth certificates are issued by the appropriate government registrars, and are what is known as the ‘Long-Form’, ‘Full’ or ‘A4’ birth certificate. These Long-Form Birth Certificates will include any details of the birth parents of the child. In the case where the father of the child was either not known, or not identified at the time of registration, only the mother would be named. This differs from a Short Birth Certificate which does not include any parents’ names.

Our birth records are limited to the beginning of civil registration within each country. For England and Wales this dates back to July 1^st 1837, for Scotland it is January 1^st 1855 and for Northern Ireland it is July 1^st 1864.

Under UK law, birth certificates are known as Public Records which means that any person can apply for a copy of any certificate, providing that they know the details of the birth that is required. This can be helpful for both government and legal services needing proof of birth, as well as family history (genealogy) researchers looking to discover new ancestors. Please note however that where we believe an application to be connected with an attempt to obtain information for the purposes of identity fraud, the application may be rejected and details passed to the relevant police authority.

If the child has subsequently been adopted, the birth certificate can only be obtained if the original birth name of the child is known. We cannot issue a birth certificate under an adopted name, unless the adopted name is the same as the birth name. In these cases, you should apply for an Adoption Certificate instead. The birth certificate of an adopted person will be written on showing that the birth certificate is now out of date as it has been superceded by the adoption. Therefore it will rarely be needed for any official purpose, with the Adoption Certificate replacing the birth certificate for official purposes.