As a means of verifying names, places and dates, there are alternatives to certificates. For example, if you want to confirm a marriage or death, you can look at parish records for marriages and burials. These are often microfiched by family history centres and record offices, and most will let you obtain photocopies of relevant entries. This isn't all that different to requesting certificates, as they are also copies. The cost varies according to the place in question, but you can expect to pay around 50p per photocopy. It might sound pricey, but it's a fraction of the price of a GRO certificate and will often give much the same information.
Using parish records. The big downside of this is that you need to know the parish in which the event took place. People moved around a fair bit and will not necessarily have stayed in one specific village (or even one particular county) for long. If you're not sure of the rough parish or date(s), it doesn't mean that you can't find the event in parish records. However, be prepared for a long and drawn-out search process!
Using parish records to find birth records can be more problematic as it was baptisms that were recorded. In some cases though, the birth date would be included in the margin or in a separate column - especially if the baptism happened some time after the birth. It wasn't that uncommon to have baptisms conducted one to two years after the birth, and this may have been reflected in the baptism entry. This won't always have been the case though, but it's worth having a look if you don't want to shell out for a birth certificate. Often, there will be much the same information included in the parish records, such as the name(s) of the child, the names of the parents (if both were given), the occupation(s) of the parents, and sometimes the address at which the child was born.
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