Comparing BMD indexes for England and Wales: Ancestry

There are separate databases for:

England & Wales, Civil Registration Birth Index, 1837-1915 (free index)

England & Wales, Civil Registration Birth Index, 1916-2005

England & Wales, Civil Registration Death Index, 1837-1915 (free index)

England & Wales, Civil Registration Death Index, 1916-2007

England & Wales, Civil Registration Marriage Index, 1837-1915 (free index)

England & Wales, Civil Registration Marriage Index, 1916-2005

There is another database ‘England and Wales, Death Index, 2007-2015’, but this does not come from GRO data.

The six databases can be searched individually, and there is an option to search all of the above databases at once, called ‘England and Wales, Birth, Marriage and Death Indexes, 1837-2005’ For some odd reason this category also includes six databases of church records from Derbyshire, Somerset and Wiltshire, and the search fields seem more suited to parish register searching.

The wider category ‘Birth, Marriage & Death, including Parish’ includes all of the above, plus more than 300 related collections such as church registers and probate calendars and obituaries, from all parts of the British Isles. However, even the ‘one size fits all’ search screen for this category has a lot of options for refining a search. No category is mandatory, and each field can be set to ‘exact’ or a variety of flexible options. 

Search options

When searching a single database you can select ‘Exact’ for any search field, which enables the use of wild cards * at any point in the word. An ‘Exact’ search in the forename field will return all the results where that name appears, even as a middle name - so a search for Mary will return results for Mary Ann, but there seems to be no way to confine the search to Mary without any other forenames. Leaving the ‘Exact’  box unticked for a name field searched using name variants, which can be useful, but there is no way of knowing which variants have been included or excluded.

You can select an exact year, or up to + or - 10 years. There is a drop-down menu for the month - although the results are always in quarters up to 1983. If you select January, February or March you will get results for the March quarter, and so on. The place search options are less helpful; there is just the standard Ancestry place option, which auto-fills to places in its worldwide database. This does not include a number of registration districts, and even when override this by typing the exact name of one of these ‘missing’ districts it returns no results. This is likely to happen with a district name which is not also the name of a parish or town within it; for example, ’Medway’ will return no results, but ‘Medway, Kent’ will return results from every district in Kent.

Search results

When searching across multiple databases, there are two ways of viewing the results; the ‘Records’ tab lists all of the individual results from all the categories, and the ‘Categories’ tab shows a list of the databases with results, and the number of results in each. 

The results within each database come in chronological order by year (not by quarter) and alphabetically within each year. They show the name, registration district and a county (which does not appear in the original index, and is not always accurate) You can also view an image of the original index page. Each result also has a shopping cart symbol where you can order a copy of the certificate, but this is NOT RECOMMENDED because it costs more than twice as much as ordering direct from the GRO, and will take longer.

The layout of the results varies a little between the various databases, but have similar features, and if you click on ‘View record’ against a particular entry, you will see them all. These include a full transcription of the entry and a link to the original index page (up to 1983). Results from the marriage indexes 1837-1915 include the all the names with the same volume and page reference, to help you identify likely spouses.

If you search the birth indexes by surname, but without a forename, the results from 1911 onwards include entries under other surnames, but where the surname you are searching is the mother’s maiden name. There is no way of searching by mother’s maiden name only in the 1837-1915 birth indexes, but the search options for the 1916-2007 database includes a ‘Mother’ field, for the mother’s maiden name. 

The original paper version of the marriage indexes from 1912 include the surname of the spouse, but the Ancestry results helpfully include the full name of the spouse. 

Death indexes include an age at death from 1866, which in the Ancestry results appears as an estimated year of birth eg ‘abt 1840’ but ‘View record’ shows the age as it appears in the paper index. Results 1837-1915 appear in chronological order, which may not be obvious at first, because it is in order of estimated year of birth, except where the age at death does not appear in the indexes, in which case the year of death is used instead, in practice for results from 1837 to 1865. 

There is no way to re-sort or download search results, although you can choose how many to show at a time, 10, 20 or 50. You can also widen your search to other sets of databases without re-entering the search data. This can be useful where a result from another category helps you identify the right entry - for example a probate calendar entry for a death, or the parish register copy for a marriage.

Phillimore Atlas and Index of Parish Registers 

All of the 1837-1915 indexes include a feature which could have been brilliant, but sadly, has been badly executed.

Extract from the Kent parish map

The full record includes a hyperlink ‘View Ecclesiastical Parishes associated with this Registration District’ which takes you to a list of parishes, based on information extracted from the excellent Phillimore Atlas and Index of Parish Registers. Against each parish is a link to the Atlas’s map for that county, and a simple grid reference to locate the parish within the map, eg 5G, 3A etc. If you look at these maps in the book version of the Atlas you will see that the county maps aren’t overlaid with an actual grid, but have letters and numbers in the margin, which works very well as a visual guide, without cluttering the map with extra lines. The Ancestry parish lists have painstakingly included all these references, but unfortunately, the numbers and letters have been cropped from the images of maps, so you have to guess where they might have been. Oops!

There are some transcription errors, but a much bigger problem is the way that the parishes are listed in their registration districts; if the name of the district contains more than one word, the list will show all the parishes in districts which contain any of those words. So the link for the registration district of St George in the East goes to a list of parishes in districts all over the country, including St Martin in the Fields, Newcastle in Emlyn, Stow on the Wold, and Bury St Edmunds, to name but a few. 

Browse options

The search options and the way the results are presented leave much to be desired, but on the plus side, it is very easy to browse the original index pages. The main search page for each database has a browse option on the right-hand side where you select a year, a quarter, and then an initial letter; so you can reproduce the experience of using the old born index volumes, but without the heavy lifting.

The links to the Phillimore Atlas maps are not very helpful in this context, but they do contain a lot of useful information, and you can browse the map images, either by following the links from your search results, of from the Atlas’s own landing page. 

Comparing websites – Birth, marriage and death indexes for England and Wales

I recently delivered a talk at Rootstech 2018, which was well-received, and this spurred me on to return to some work I did on comparing the online indexes that appear on various websites. This post is an overview of the main sites and their coverage, and will be followed by more in-depth looks at the individual sites. Anyone who doesn't mind listening to me for an hour can view the Rootstech presentation in full. 

indexes Indexes to the birth, marriage and death registers for England and Wales are very widely available. You will find them on a number of sites, some free, some commercial. Although the records are (theoretically) the same, there are differences between the various indexes, and it is worth knowing about them to get the best results from your searches.

There is a single set of records for births, marriages and deaths since 1837, held by the General Register Office (GRO). But this is not the only set. Births and deaths are registered at a local Register Office, and the original records are still held locally. The central registers were compiled from copies sent to the GRO, called quarterly returns. 

Marriage registers are a little more complicated, because marriages could be performed in a number of places; principally, churches of various denominations, synagogues, Quaker meeting houses and register offices. The original registers may be with the church (or more usually a local record office), or at the register office, but, like the births and marriages, the GRO marriage registers were compiled from the quarterly returns.

The main sites where you can consult indexes to GRO registers are: 

• www.FreeBMD.org.uk
• www.Ancestry.co.uk
• www.FindmyPast.co.uk 
• www.genesreunited.co.uk
• www.familysearch.org
• www.gro.gov.uk
• www.myheritage.com
• www.thegenealogist.co.uk
• www.bmdindex.co.uk

None of them is complete, and they all have their strengths and weaknesses, so it is worth using a combination of them for best results. The most recent indexes are not online anywhere, they can only be consulted on microfiche at selected locations – details of these are on the GRO site.

Coverage

FreeBMD 1837-1983

As the name suggests, this is a free site, the result of an enormous amount of work by an army of volunteers. It is still a work in progress, although the coverage charts for births, marriages and deaths show that it is virtually complete up to the early 1960s, but with many gaps after that. It ends at 1983, the last year before the indexes were ‘born digital’ and the databases were retained by the GRO. 

Ancestry 1837-2005 (births and marriages) 1837-2007 (deaths)

This is a commercial site, but there is free access at many libraries, record offices and FamilySearch centres. However, Ancestry’s indexes 1837-1915 for all three events come from FreeBMD, and so are still free to search on Ancestry. You will not always get identical results from the two sites because both allow users to submit corrections, so any amendments or updates to FreeBMD after Ancestry acquired the data will only appear on FreeBMD. Similarly, any changes made on Ancestry will not appear on FreeBMD. Indexes from 1916 to 2005 (births and marriages) and 1916 to 2007 (deaths) are Ancestry’s own. You can also browse the images of the index volumes 1837 to 1983.

FindmyPast 1837-2005 (marriages) 1837-2006 (births) 1837-2007 (deaths)

Also a commercial site, but with free access at many libraries record offices and FamilySearch centres. All of the indexes on FindmyPast were prepared independently of those on FreeBMD or Ancestry. You will also find them on www.Genenesreunited.co.uk, which is owned by the same company. You can also browse images of the index pages 1937 to 1983. The indexes can also be searched free of charge on www.familysearch.org

General Register Office 1837-1917 (births) 1837-1957 (deaths) 

These indexes are free to search, but you need to register an account with the site and log in to use them. You need to do this anyway to order certificates from the GRO; ordering GRO certificates from anywhere else will cost more, and take longer. The GRO’s own indexes are the newest to appear online, and are limited in coverage, but they were created by re-indexing the quarterly returns. All of the others are transcriptions of the existing indexes. 

MyHeritage 1837-2005

It is not clear from the MyHeritage site whether they have compiled their own indexes, or obtained them under licence from another site. As well as the three databases for 1837-2005, there is a GRO birth index for 1911-1954. This is one of the three major commercial sites worldwide, along with Ancestry and FindmyPast, but has a relatively low profile in the UK, so it is less likely to be available free of charge in record office and libraries, but there is free access in FamilySearch centres.

  

The Genealogist 1837-2005

These indexes were prepared independently of the others, and are also available  on www.bmdindex.co.uk which belongs to the same company.  FamilySearch centres have free access, and some libraries and record offices may also have free access; but it is much less widespread than the two main commercial sites. 

Mappy Monday - Middlesex electoral map 1845



Middlesex 1845

The London and Middlesex electoral registers recently released on Ancestry.co.uk have attracted quite a lot of attention, so this seemed like a good time to bring out this map. It is an electoral map of Middlesex in 1845, showing the polling  places, indicated by a cross, and those boroughs entitled to elect two members of parliament, indicated by a black circle. The MPS elected by the boroughs were in addition to the members elected by the whole county. 

This was after the Reform Act of 1832, which reflected for the first time the notion that the number of MPs returned should have some correlation with the size of an area's population. There was still a long way to go, though; it was a step in the right direction, but we had moved from 'hardly anyone can vote' to 'a few people can vote'. You still had to be a) an adult male and b) the occupier of property over a certain value, to vote in parliamentary elections. There were different rules for local elections, and women could vote in these depending on the date and the place. 

Another notable feature of elections until 1872 was that there was no secret ballot. Voting meant declaring publicly your choice of candidate, or candidates. From the candidate's point of view this had the advantage that if you bribed someone to vote for you, they couldn't double-cross you by voting for the other man and pocketing the money anyway. Sometimes you will find the record of votes cast recorded and published in poll books. These can be very revealing if you find one for an election where your ancestor voted.

Great Stanmore 1851: LMA MR/PEO/1851/4/3 (Image from Ancestry.co.uk)

Although very few people could vote in the earlier years, it can still be worth looking at the register for the place where your ancestors lived. I called my earlier post 'Who was Stanmore Groat?' because it was a mis-rendering of the name of the parish of Great Stanmore. It was a small place, and it isn't marked on this map, but it is close to Edgware, which is shown. Edgware is on the east side of the road and the two Stanmores, Great and Little, are on the west side. Great Stanmore's population in 1851 was 1180, but there were only 22 voters, and half of them didn't even live in Great Stanmore, they just held property there. If you look at the printed register it tells you quite a bit about the place, and you will see names of some occupiers who are not voters, so you shouldn't assume that these early electoral registers are of no interest to you because your ancestors were not among the voting classes.

You can find registers for a place by browsing the collection, and while the drop-down menu claims to be a list of boroughs, you will see that it also includes three counties; London, Middlesex and Surrey. Some of these interesting early registers are found under 'Middlesex' where they should be, but most are in 'London' which didn't exist as a county until 1889. Never mind. I may talk about the whole London/Middlesex thing sometime, if I can summon the strength.

While most of the registers are later in date, and from 1889 you are much more likely to find you ancestors in them, but please don't neglect the early ones. It is worth the effort of negotiating your way through Ancestry's characteristically eccentric means of classification to find them. 


 

Abundant Genealogy - Week 2 - Paid Online Genealogy Tools

Paid online genealogy tools are essential to the researcher today, but the choice can be bewildering, especially for the beginner. I am sometimes asked 'Which is the best?', but there is no simple answer. First of all you need to ask yourself what records you need to look at, and then find the site or sites that have them. Some popular records, like the census. are on multiple sites, so you have a choice, but many others can only be found on a single site, so if that's what you need to look at, then that's where you need to go. Decision made. The other choice you may have to make is how to pay for the records you want to access; you don't always have a choice, but sometimes you can select different subscription levels or time periods, or even a pay-per-view option.

I am most familiar with British records, so these are the examples I am going to discuss here, starting with the census for England and Wales. Indexed census images are on a number of sites, such as Ancestry.co.uk, Findmypast.co.uk, Genes Reunited , TheGenealogist.co.uk or British Origins and they all have their strengths and weaknesses. Apart from 1881, where everyone uses the same set of transcription data, you will find some differences in the transcriptions. Even where the data is the same, the search engine on one site may work better for you than another. So whatever site you use, it is often worth checking one of the others if your search is unsuccessful.

For most other records you will have fewer sites to choose from, because there is much less duplication. So you need to work out which site has, for example, the baptism, marriage or burial records you need. This may be easier said than done. When I do any genealogical searching online, I want to know exactly what I am searching - is it a single register, or a collection?  Is it an original church register, or a copy, or a transcript? If it is a transcript, is it from a printed source such as Phillimore's Marriages? If it is a transcript, are all the fields indexed? What are the coverage dates, and is it complete for those years or are there gaps? These are the questions I would ask when searching parish register material, but the same principles would apply to any kind of record - probate, military service, poor law and  so on. When I find a record, I want to know where the original record is held, the document reference so that I can cite my source properly; giving a web link is all very well, but these, and even whole websites can be ephemeral, while the archive reference will be constant. No matter where you look at a page of the 1891 census for England, online, on film or on fiche its unique reference will be RG 12/ followed by a piece number, a folio number and, ideally a page number too.  

Sadly, none of the commercial genealogy sites meets all these criteria. Sorry guys, but a collection description that reads "This database contains information extracted from birth and christening records from various counties in England and Wales. The records date from 1530 to 1906. The records included in this database do not represent all localities in England and Wales and for any given area, coverage (both records within a year and total year range) may not be complete. Some parishes and counties are more complete than others." just doesn't do it for me. But what annoys me most is a site where I can't see a list of its datasets without signing in or subscribing.

Finally, there are some useful British records that you may only find on a single site, and that may not be familiar to you. Service records (mainly pension records) for men who left the British Army before 1913 are on Findmypast.co.uk service records for the Royal Navy, the Royal Marines and a number of other records relating the armed forces are on DocumentsOnline (pay-per-view only), as are Prerogative Court of Canterbury wills (you can also view them on TheGenealogist.co.uk., by subscription) There is more useful probate material on British Origins along with some other resources you won't find anywhere else. These are just a few suggestions, and you should find even more once you start looking beyond the better-known sites.

Happy hunting

 

Same BMD databases, different sites: Part One - England and Wales

There are many popular records that you can find on more than one genealogy site, and if you don't find what you want one one site, it's a good idea to try another one. There are two different reasons for this. Some records, like most British censuses, have been indexed independently by different service providers; in other cases exactly the same database appears on more than one site, but different search engines mean that one site may give better results than another. This is why it is sometimes worth using a commercial site to search indexes that are free elsewhere.

The Civil Registration birth, marriage and death indexes for England and Wales are available on a number of sites; none of them, sadly, provided by the General Register Office itself. The most widely used is FreeBMD an astonishing example of volunteer effort on a massive scale. As the name implies, it is free to use, and because it has only one function, searching the BMD indexes, it is expressly designed for that purpose, and it works extremely well.

Birth marriage and death indexes are also on Ancestry, Findmypast, TheGenealogist, BMDindexes and FamilyRelatives. BMDindexes is a standalone site which is also part of TheGenealogist, so the indexes are the same, but I can't comment beyond that because I am not a subscriber to either. Ancestry's indexes up to 1915 are the FreeBMD indexes, and are clearly listed as such, but for 1916 to 1983 they have their own indexes. Findmypast and FamilyRelatives have each done their own indexing, so for any period up to 1983 you have a choice of several independently compiled indexes. Indexes from 1984 to 2005 were 'born digital' and the databases used to be sold by the GRO to commercial companies. No indexes more recent than this are available online, with the exception of 2006 births and marriages which are on Findmypast only.

I may look at the relative merits of the various indexes some other time, but what I set out to discuss here was the reasons you might choose to one site rather than another for the same database. Specifically, why would you search for BMDs on Ancestry rather than FreeBMD? I have to admit that I nearly always use FreeBMD. The FreeBMD updates don't reach Ancestry straight away, although this is a minor issue, since most of the activity on FreeBMD these days is in the post-1915 period that they don't share with Ancestry. The question of coverage is still relevant, though, since even for the earlier years FreeBMD is not complete. The FreeBMD site itself has very informative coverage charts, which show you where the gaps are, but you won't find this information on Ancestry.

Another advantage of FreeBMD is that you can search just births, marriages or deaths, or across all three, and you can restrict your search to very specific time periods. This is possible on Ancestry, up to a point, but unless you want a single year or quarter, you can only select +/- 1, 2, 5, 10 or 20 years. You can also search just births, or marriages, or deaths, but not two or all three unless you want to search a lot of Ancestry's other databases at the same time.

After all this you might wonder why I would ever suggest searching these BMDs on Ancestry at all, since FreeBMD seems so much better. And since FreeBMD is free to use, and Ancestry is a commercial site, surely there is no contest? Well, actually there are several reasons for considering Ancestry. First of all, although it is a commercial site, some of its databases are free, including the FreeBMD ones, so cost is not an issue. Ancestry also has a number of features that can be useful for some searches.

When you search for a forename on Ancestry it will return all the results when that name appears in any part of the forename field, while FreeBMD only returns results where it is the first name, not one of the middle names (although FreeBMD will return middle name results if you put + in front of the forename). I have my own Ancestry search pages set to Old Search, with 'Exact matches only' as the default, but if you use New Search you can set a wider range of individual search options for each field. So a search for 'William' on Old Search will return William, William George, George William etc, and the default search option for the forename field on New Search will also return results like George W. There are other settings that you can experiment with, and the surname field offers both phonetic and Soundex options, which bring different results.

Another potentially useful feature of Ancestry is that surname search results will include those where it appears as the mother's maiden name in the birth indexes, although this only begins in the September quarter of 1911. If you are an Ancestry subscriber, results from FreeBMD indexes will be included in searches across multiple databases, which has the value of convenience.

So it's worth considering all the options, even if you are in the habit of using the same one all the time as a matter of habit. I certainly did when I was preparing the blog post. I shall probably use Ancestry a little more than previously, although FreeBMD will remain my first choice most of the time. But no matter which search option you choose, when it comes to ordering certificates make sure that you do this through the GRO's own Certificate Ordering service, or from the local register office, where it will cost £9.25. Anyone else who offers a certificate ordering service has to use the GRO service, so you might as well go direct and save yourself time and money.

Commonwealth War Graves Registers on Ancestry - worth the trouble?

When I saw that these records had been added to Ancestry, I wondered what the point was, since the Commonwealth War Graves Commission site already has all this information, and it is completely free. It also has cemetery plans, and all sorts of other information, including printable certificates for each casualty. But of course I had to have a closer look, just in case there was something there that I was missing. The results were quite interesting.

Plymouth Naval Memorial  

The Commonwealth War Graves site has a single database for all services and nationalities, and for both world wars. The records recently added to Ancestry.com are for the First world War only, and comprise two separate databases. First there is the 'British Commonwealth War Graves Register 1914-1918' which contains entries from only about 250 cemeteries in three countries; most of them are in France, with a few in Belgium and Iraq. The source is the series of books printed by the Imperial War Graves Commission (as it was called then) in the 1920s. I compared a number of entries in these books with their equivalents on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) site, and found no differences, except that in a few cases the printed books said 'killed in action', 'died of wounds' or 'died of disease', which did not appear on the website. I did find one entry where the CWGC gave the wrong date - 1916 instead of 1918 - but the correct date was in the book.

So there doesn't seem to be any great advantage in using Ancestry for these war deaths, beyond the outside chance of finding a entry that had been mis-transcribed by the CWGC. We can already check 'Soldiers Died in the Great War' for place of birth and place of enlistment, a database which is available on more than one site. But there is one advantage to using Ancestry; not for the information it gives, but for the search engine. If you put a place name in the Keyword(s) box you can find men from a particular town, and the name search finds names of next of kin as well as the fallen soldiers - try putting in female names and you will see what I mean.

The second set of records is 'UK, Royal Navy and Royal Marine War Graves Roll, 1914-1919' and for all the entries that I compared provides more detail than the CWGC. This often includes next of kin information, and exact birthdate where the CWGC just gives an age at death. I also found a number of cases where the CWGC gave only initials, but Ancestry's database provides full names. So this is definitely worth using, even if you have already found and entry for your sailor or marine on the CWGC site - with a couple of exceptions. First of all, the men listed are in the Royal Navy or the Royal Marines, but not the Merchant Navy, although I found a member of my own family there who was a merchant seaman, but whose ship had been commandeered by the Royal Navy, so there should be others like him.  Ancestry's description of the records suggests that the database contains records of Royal Navy and Royal Marines officers, but I could only find records of other ranks. One section of the description refers to the War Office, and seems to apply to the Army rather than the Royal Navy and Royal Marines, whose records were kept by the Admiralty. I will need to investigate further to get to the bottom of this. Watch this space.