England and Wales
The Births and Deaths Registration Act 1836 divided England and Wales into registration districts. The districts were not innovations, however, but were identical to the poor law unions already in existence. Unions had been formed by the grouping parishes surrounding towns in which a workhouse was situated without reference to geographical county boundaries. Many PLUs included areas in two or more civil counties.
Registration counties (also known as poor law counties) were formed by the aggregation of registration districts by reference to which county the workhouse was situated in. Accordingly, the boundaries of registration counties rarely coincided with those of the civil county. Attempts to establish a single set of county boundaries in the 1880s were unsuccessful.
The registration counties were used in the compilation of census results from 1851 to 1911.
Read more about this topic: Registration County
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