Hello Dave,
I recently documented a birth where the child lived for 5 minutes. I
did entered this as the two events. The Birth certificate stated it was
a live birth. The death cert said the age at death was 5 minutes.
You may already kn ow this but, here goes…
In England and Wales, if even one breath was drawn, then there must be
separate birth and death events recorded. If the child drew no breath
at all, then a stillborn event occurred and must be recorded as such.
These stillbirth events are kept separate from regular births and
deaths, and the register is closed (can’t buy copies). This was not
always the case, however. In the early days of civil registration,
stillbirths could just as easily go unrecorded.
In the normal run of things, therefore, it’s quite hard to prove a
stillbirth occurred. One would need information from a person that knew
of the stillbirth. Not easy for an event that occurred (say) 100 years
ago.