I’ve been using here and a breed specific website to search kennel names but is there any other way to check the blood lines of a dog? I am conscious that some people have been using fake kennel club docs and wouldn’t know how to spot a fake so would rather have an online history of the dog.

Is the lack of sharing a kennel name a red flag or genuine protection for the breeder?

Of you go to the kennel club website you can use the health test finder to search a dog by name. It now only shows you who the parents are, the old one you could see a 3 gen pedigree but it's now been changed for some reason. So while not much use anymore for pedigree research you can at least check that the make exists and is for a dog of the correct breed, age and sex.
https://www.thekennelclub.org.uk/search/health-test-results-finder/

You can of course click on parents names to check their health tests, then click on each of theirs and so on back through the generations.

There is no good reason why a breeder would not give the names of the parents/prospective parents.

Also you can put just the Kennel prefix/affix into the search and most dogs with that Kennel prefix will come up, so you can see other results from that kennel.

Going back if you click on any parent, at the bottom it should tell you how many litters they are parents of.

You can then see if you are hapoy with numbers of litters, age and spacing of these, as signs of the breeders breeding practices.

I used to contribute to the KC Breed Records but only recently stopped (finances).   Over the years, I've been able to do a lot of research specific to my breed, to make up pedigrees for others who needed that research, going back to the early 1930s and earlier.   At one point I made up two 10-generation (round) pedigrees on my foundation bitch, and later a dog we imported into Canada, who was then behind all successive generations.   Small wonder I now wear glasses.    Such Records don't of course, give health tests but it was a very interesting thing to do.

I've found that these days, newer breeders in my main breed, aren't interested in what went before....... 

I have noticed the same, but it is important. Some rarely know more than the parents off the top of their heads.

I have all my breed club journals right back to the beginning.

These have a lot of photos.

You can trace traits good and bad that have been passed down, and how lines have developed, and at what point certain traits good and bad started appearing.

With linebreeding, ancestors further back may have more influence than others.

Some dogs are/were also very prepotent and tended to pass their traits more strongly.

Thanks for the replies everyone this is really useful particularly the kennel club health search!

As a buyer I didn’t think it was odd to ask for a kennel name. I’m purely doing it to make sure they have been breeding properly and are therefore likely to inherit the appropriate desirable traits. I don’t want to use the info to breed myself.

And you are quite right to do, certainly what I wish more people did/knew how to do.

Any good breeder will be happy to bore you to death wirh pedigree information, why this dog was used in hopes of fixing this trait, mitigating that etc.

Breeding is a bit like Cooking.

> go to the kennel club website you can use the health test finder to search a dog by name.

There are quite a few breeds though that don't have any recommended health tests, a lot of the sighthounds have no recommended health tests on the KC website. It's pretty rare for them to be hip scored or have any dna testing so for the original poster it's not necessarily something to worry about if you can't find any health test results, depending on the breed.