Reddit reviews Tracing Your Family Tree

Another possibility is that his birth could have been registered but not indexed. I'm not sure if this is possible in England, but if his birth wasn't indexed, a search of the local registrar's books would have to be carried out. Maybe, you could contact a local history/ heritage centre if Norwich has one and ask them for advice regarding this.

I also have a copy of this book: http://www.amazon.com/Tracing-Your-Family-Kathy-Chater/dp/0754819868/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1464457976&sr=1-7#customerReviews . And in its section on BMD records of the General Register Office, it says this: 'In the first ten years or so following the introduction of national registration, parents were not obliged to notify the registrar of a child's birth, and if a child was not registered within six months, it could not be included in the records. There seems also to have been some confusion about whether it was necessary to register a child if it had also been baptized. In 1874, fines were introduced for non-notification by the parents, which improved the situation.

This lack of registration, combined with the bureacracy involved in copying entries as they were passed from level to level in the system, means that a number of events are missing from the indexes, especially in the earlier period. There may be as many as 15 percent of the births missing for 1837-47, and as many as 1 in 40 marriages missing for 1837-99. There are also the difficulties caused by copying errors and by dealing with illiterate people who did not know how their names were written, and who probably had strong regional accents . Registrars had, in many cases, to guess at the name and how it was spelled.'