LAW, ORDER AND RECORDS
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as there are registered ones. The position regarding unregistered marriages is far from satisfactory. The great majority are of doubtful validity, since they are contracted not in accordance with the full traditional forms prescribed by Chinese custom but in supposed conformity with the pre-war civil code of China. This unsatisfactory situation and the best means of remedying it are under consideration by Government.
Births and Deaths. The registration of births and deaths is compulsory under the Births and Deaths Registration Ordinance. The General Register Office, at which all records of births and deaths are kept, is at Li Po Chun Chambers, Connaught Road Central. Facilities for registration are also provided at 16 district registries. Eight of these are on Hong Kong Island, five in Kowloon, and three in the New Territories. In the outlying areas and islands, births are registered at the local rural committee offices by district registrars during regular visits, and deaths are registered at local police stations.
The ordinance provides for the post-registration of births which have not been registered within one year after the date of birth. Most of these post-registration cases concern adults and older children in the New Territories, where facilities for registration were not available until 1932. Since a birth certificate is essential for such purposes as school enrolment or obtaining a passport to go overseas for employment, there has been a continuous flow of some 500 applications each month for the post-registration of births, mostly from people in the New Territories. To deal with these, three post-registration teams are in operation based in the larger centres of population in the New Territories.
The Births and Deaths Registry compiles the Colony's vital statistics. These include birth and death rates and statistics of causes of death. For the latter the Hollerith system is used, 16 items of information about each death being recorded on a punched card.
During the year, 115,263 births (59,432 male and 55,831 female) and 19,748 deaths (10,973 male, 8,761 female and 14 unknown sex) were registered as compared with 111,905 births and 20,324 deaths in 1962. The birth rate per mille was 32.1 and death rate per mille 5.5. Only 39 illegitimate children were registered without the name of the father in the birth entry. This small