Comparing BMD indexes for England and Wales: Findmypast

Birth, marriage and death indexes are searched separately with customised search forms, or as part of more general categories. If you search a specific database (reached via the A-Z of record sets) the search page contains links to the other two civil registration databases, but you need to re-enter the data each time you switch to another database. There are no mandatory fields so you can search without a surname, or without any name all. If you are searching a single database for civil births, marriages or deaths, there is a neat feature that shows you how many results you will get once you have entered your search terms, but before you perform the search; when you have entered information in any of the search fields the text on the Search button turns to ‘See xxx results’.

On the search screen the ‘Name variant’ box is ticked for the First Name(s) field, and unticked for the Last Name field, which is generally the best option, but you can change this if you wish. Name variants on the first name will return common variants and diminutives such as Tom or Tommy for Thomas (and vice-versa), followed by results including the initial letter of the name.

Births 

The search screen for births includes a field for Mother’s Last Name, and when you start typing in this box there is a warning that the information only appears in the index from 1911 onwards. However, Mother’s Last Name has recently been added to some, but not all, birth index entries back to 1837, so search including years before 1911 may produce some results. You can use wildcards in the name fields if you leave the ‘Name Variants’ box unticked.

The default setting for the Birth Year box is +/- 2 years, but you can easily change this to limit your search to a single year, or +/- 1, 5, 10, 20 or 40 years. You can also limit your search results to a single quarter, which Findmypast describes as 1, 2, 3 or 4, instead of the more usual Mar, Jun, Sep and Dec, or Jan-Mar, Apr-Jun etc. You need to do this using Findmypast’s equivalent of the drop-down menu, where it says ‘Browse Birth Quarter’; when you select this option you tick the box of the quarter you require, and you can select more than one quarter. The Birth Quarter field contains the text ‘Start typing a birth quarter’ but nothing you type here has any effect, although this feature works perfectly well in other fields on this search page, ‘Browse District’ and ‘Browse County’. When using either of these options you can select from the Browse menu, or you can start typing in the search box when you will see a list of options appear, and you need to click on an option to select it. Typing alone, without selecting an option, will have no effect. This feature is used throughout Findmypast on many of its search pages. It is less intuitive than a conventional drop-down menu, but it has the advantage that you can easily select more than one district or county, and your selected options are clearly visible below the search box.

The District options are registration districts as they appear in the indexes. The County option is a useful way to restrict a search to a rough geographical area, but is not part of the index entry, and many registration districts straddle county boundaries. It can sometimes be more useful than the District option, because there have been many district changes since 1837, and it is possible to unwittingly select a registration district that did not exist during the years being searched, and so fail to get the results you might expect. There are two more search fields on the Birth search page, ‘Place Keywords’ and ‘Optional Keywords’. Typing any name or place name in the Optional Keywords box will produce results or filter existing ones, but since there are already perfectly good name and place search boxes this is of limited use. ‘Place Keywords’, on the other hand, can be a really useful feature; you can only search by registration district using the District field, but here you can type the name of a parish or other place. When you start typing you can choose from a list. For example, selecting ‘Gillingham, Kent, England’ will produce results from the the registration districts of Medway or Chatham, depending on the date. This is very helpful when you know a place of birth, but are not familiar with registration district boundaries and their changes over the years.

The results show the name, year, quarter, district and county, and the mother’s maiden name, where applicable. From 1984 onwards the indexes are annual, not quarterly, and the reference shows the month of registration, which has been converted to a notional quarter on the main results screen. There is also a panel on the left side of the results screen where you can refine your search, but this lacks some of the fields of the custom search page. This is fine as a quick way to change the name or date details, and if you need to go back to the custom search screen ‘Advanced options’ will take you there.

You can’t download the search results, but you can re-sort them by any of the fields displayed. The full reference details, including the volume and page (and the month, where applicable) are only displayed when you click on the transcription for each entry. Unfortunately there is no way to search or sort by volume and page number.

Deaths 

The search page for deaths is, not surprisingly, fairly similar to that for births, since many of the fields are the same. Because the death indexes show the age at death from 1866, there is a ‘Year of birth’ field, with the same +/- options. When you click in this box to start typing, you might expect to see a note to the effect that the age at death is not shown in the indexes until 1866, but instead there is the rather puzzling ‘most of our civil death & burial records cover the years of birth 1780 to 2006’.

Although the results displayed will include the year of birth, this does not appear in the indexes until 1969, so before this date it will be a figure arrived at by subtracting the age at death from the year of registration. This means that the calculated year of birth will sometimes be a year out - this is not a major problem in most cases, since the age supplied when registering a death is often inaccurate in the first place. Both the age at death and the calculated year of birth appear in the full transcription for deaths up to the March quarter of 1969, after that the year, month and day of birth are shown in the transcription.

At first sight, the place search options look more helpful than those for birth searches, because instead of ‘Optional keywords’ there is a Parish option which you can browse. But the ‘Place keywords’ box is still more useful; taking the example of Gillingham, the ‘Browse parish’ list offers only Gillingham, but there are three parishes of that name in England, so it will produce results from registration districts in Dorset, Kent and Norfolk. The Place keywords field allows you to distinguish between several parishes of the same name.

Marriages 

The marriage search does not have either the ‘Optional keywords’ or ‘Parish’ fields, only the more useful ‘Place keywords’, along with District and County. There are also fields for the surname and forename of the spouse, and the results show name, year, quarter, district, county and spouse’s surname (from 1912). Unlike the birth and death searches, there are fields for volume and page references. While this is useful, the main reason for using this facility is to identify likely spouses; but if you click on the transcription of an entry you will see the ‘Marriage finder’ feature that does this automatically. From 1912, when the surname of the spouse is included in the index, this will almost always be a single name, but in earlier years there can be several possible spouses, depending on the number of entries on the same page. The Marriage Finder suggests spouses of the opposite sex, based on their forenames, but in the case of forenames that can be either male or female it will present all the other names on the page, to be on the safe side.


 For all three events Findmypast provides some background information, which is generally helpful, although some of the advice is questionable, such as ‘If you can’t find your ancestors in these records, it’s possible they eloped or were in common law relationships.’ to their credit, they also direct you to the GRO site to order copies.

Browsing

Quite separate from the three search functions is 'England & Wales Birth, Marriage and Death Browse 1837-1983'. You can type or browse the event type, and the year +/- 1, 2, 5, 10, 20 or 40 as on the other screens, and type or browse the quarter. This time the 'Start typing a Event Quarter' (sic) works, because the quarters are described here as Jan-Mar, etc. The results list individual pages from the scanned indexes, described by name ranges, eg 'FAIRLESS, Joseph - FARRAL, Catharine'. There is an alphabet at the top of the page so that you can jump directly to any part of the index. Once you have clicked on the image link to the scanned page, you can browse forward or back through the images without returning to the results 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. 

Hello sailor! Merchant Navy records now online at Findmypast

The Merchant Navy service records on Findmypast have now been extended to cover the period 1835-1941. This is great news, although not quite as good as it might first appear. This is not the fault of the good people at Findmypast, it is due to the fact that there was no central registry of seamen in the merchant service between 1858 and 1917. This is of course the period that many of us are interested in. There are other sources that you can use for this period, there just isn't a nice 'one-stop shop' kind of service record to be found for those years.

The records added to Findmypast today are those for 1835-1857, which will be of enormous use to many researchers (not including me, as far as I know, but I'm always prepared to be surprised). There is a lot of useful help on the site, in the Knowledge Base area, including a link to The National Archives guide on Merchant Seamen serving up to 1857

Have fun.

 

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

 

Findmypast - improved overseas birth and marriage indexes

Unlike births, marriages and deaths in England and Wales, the indexes to the General Register Office's Miscellaneous Overseas Collection are not widely available online. They are available free of charge on Familyrelatives.com, but you have to browse, page by page, through a wide variety of indexes, in a variety of formats. As someone who used to arrive at St Catherine's House at the crack of dawn, way back in the 1980s, to look at the indexes, I'm still quite impressed that I can now do this at home at all. Still, it's good when someone makes your life a bit easier.

This is what Findmypast.co.uk have now done with this collection. This is very good news for a number of reasons; obviously it's nice to have a name index where none existed before, but the fact that you can search over several indexes at once is an added bonus. There is also another advantage, which is to do with the nature of these particular records; it has never been compulsory for overseas events to be notified to the Registrar General, and when they are notified, the same time limits for registration do not apply. So an event can be registered a long time, sometimes years, after the event, and you might miss an entry because it is not where you expect it to be. The improved search means that this is less likely to happen. The amount of detail in the index varies quite a lot, but some of the modern indexes include the year or date of birth, and this information has been captured by Findmypast.

There are some other things that are worth knowing about these indexes. Although there is a collection of indexes of armed forces events from the 18th century to the 21st, the main 'British Overseas' indexes also include armed services entries for some periods. And although they have always been grouped together with various overseas births, marriages and deaths, the Armed Forces indexes, especially the births, contain many entries that actually took place in the UK (including Ireland).

Finally, useful as these indexes are, they are not always the best way to get the details of an overseas event. There is another collection of overseas registrations, once in the custody of the Registrar General, but now in one of The National Archives' miscellaneous overseas collections. These are in record series RG 32 to RG 36 and digitised images are indexed online at BMDregisters.co.uk. Many events are unique to one or other of these collections, but there is also some overlap, so it is always worth checking both sets of indexes. If an entry appears in both, it is cheaper to view the online image on BMDregisters than to order a certificate from the General Register Office.

Happy searching