The Family Recorder
Time 2021-11-13 11:07:39Web Name: The Family Recorder
WebSite: http://thefamilyrecorder.blogspot.com
ID:230721
Keywords:
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keywords: description:I write things here that interest or amuse me, and that I think are worth sharing. They might be topical, or 'cold case', educational or trivial; the only rule is that they will have something to do with genealogy.
Some years ago I wrote a blog post about using theLondonGazette, and I also gave a talk on the subject, called 'Not just the braveand the bankrupt', or something along those lines. This is because it is wellknown that the London, Edinburgh and Belfast Gazettes are key sources forpeople researching military gallantry awards, and bankruptcy cases. While thisis certainly true, there is a lot more to it, and the Gazettes are full ofinformation on many other subjects of interest to genealogists, househistorians and others. While a lot of what I wrote and said still holds true,all the details about how to use the site became completely out of date when itwas given a radical re-design.
In the (nownot very) new version of the site, some of the old search functions havedisappeared, notably the ability to perform a simple search by year and page -this is the unique identifier for any page in one of the Gazettes, and this isthe reference you will find in the printed indexes. In fact, before the Gazettesite was launched online, this was the usual way to find an entry, using theprint versions of the indexes and the Gazettes.
The currenthome page advertises all kinds of useful categories and filters, but they onlyapply to issues from 1998 onward. To research in editions any earlier, wherethe printed editions have been scanned, you can search by key-word. Thisobviously has its limitations, especially in the earlier editions, where theprint does not respond well to Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Even in the19th century, you can still find the letter 's' appearing as a character thatlooks more like 'f'. Try doing a key-word search for 'miffion' or 'paffage' andyou will see what I mean!
From 1829onward, you can still search the old-fashioned way, using the London Gazettesown published quarterly indexes, if you have an approximate date for the entryyou want. They are available on the site, but this is not obvious from the homepage, because there is no direct link to them, but they are easy to find onceyou know where to look.
From theGazette homepage, there is a drop-down menu Notices: from this menu selectPublications, which takes you to the page where you can browse recent pagesof any of the Gazettes, and at the bottom of the page you can search for anddownload the historic indexes to the London Gazette (the site has no historicindexes for the Edinburgh or Belfast Gazettes).
Whenyou find an index entry that interests you, the reference will be a pagenumber. Each year the Gazette starts at page 1, and this is why a year and apage is a unique identifier, and you can use this to find the entry you want inthe London Gazette itself.Although the old 'year and page' searchfacility is no longer there, you can still do this kind of search, it is just abit more cumbersome than it used to be.
Inthis example, from Volume 1 of the 1875 index, the advertisement for the saleof properties in Bermondsey, and freehold land on Richmond Hill is on page 3170.
Go back to the home page, and enter 3170 in the 'Search the archives' box. Unfortunately, there is no Advanced Search, you can only do a simple search, and then refine the results. In this case you will get hundreds of results to start with, but you can refine them first by selecting London from the Gazette edition filter on the left of the page, and then you can use the Publication date filter. You cant just select a single year, you need to select year, month and day in both From and To categories, or it wont work, - it's the same kind of system that you'll find when you want to book a flight or hotel room online. When you have done this, and updated the results, you should only have a few results to choose from as you can see below. The search will have picked up any instance where the number 3170 appears in that year's Gazette, but one of them will be Page 3170. You can then view that page, and download it if you wish. This method works perfectly well most of the time, but it still relies on OCR, so occasionally this will not pick up the page number. If this happens, try again with a nearby number, and then you can browse to the page you need.
The lower the page number, the greater the number of hits you will get, even using the year filter. But there are still ways to narrow the results to a more manageable number. If your initial date filter was a whole year, you can revise this to the quarter covered by the index volume (1 Jan-Mar, 2 Apr-Jun, 3 Jul-Sep, 4 Oct-Dec). If this still leaves a very large number of results, you can use the Sort by option at the top of the results to sort them into date order. This will only sort them by the date of the Gazette edition, and not in strict page order, but it makes it easy enough to scan the results to find the one you want. Its not an ideal solution, but it does work. Fortunately, most Gazette page numbers are on the high side, so you might never have to look for a page with a very low number - each Gazette year includes thousands of pages.
When you have found your Gazette page, the viewing window is quite small, but if you click on the 'save' icon in the top left corner you can see the whole page in a new tab., You can also browse all the pages in that edition using the tools at the top of the page, oruse the 'Download full PDF' tool to download the whole issue.
As well as using the indexes, you can also use the 'Search the archives' box on the home page to perform more complex key-word searches, using operators like AND or NOT etc. There is more information about this on the Help pages. This can be useful, but still has its limitations, because OCR may not pick up a word where the print is indistinct, or where it has been hyphenated at the end of a line. But it is still worth doing, because the OCR works well most of the time. You may be surprised atthe kind of information you will discover - and the more you explore, the more you will find.
No comments: Thursday, 12 November 2020 Finding Uncle GeordieMy maternal grandfather served in the Royal Navy during the First World War, and fortunately he survived. but one of his brothers was not so lucky. All I knew about him was that his name was George, he was in the army, and was killed during the First World War. I had already found his birth entry, on a visit to New Register House in the days before the ScotlandsPeople Centre. He was born 15 December 1893, only 20 months before my grandfather. On another research trip, this time to the Glasgow City Archives at the Mitchell Library, I found my widowed great-grandmothers application for Poor Relief on 23 November 1915, It included George in the list of her children, and his name had later been marked 'killed' which showed that he must have died at some point after then, but it didnt give the date of his death.
There is no surviving service record for him, which is no great surprise, since so many of them were destroyed during the Second World War. Unfortunately George Donaldson is not a very distinctive name, and a search on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission(CWGC) site for First World War army deaths produced 6 results for George Donaldson, and another 6 for G Donaldson. I wanted to see if I could identify the right one, and I like a challenge. I find it particularly satisfying to find out about the family members who died too young to have any descendants, and who can so easily fade from the collective family memory. My mother used to refer to him as Uncle Geordie, even though neither she nor any of her siblings had ever known him - her eldest sister was born in 1919 - so I wanted to find the information for her, as well as for myself.
Quite separately, I had been doing a lot of research on the men who served in the First World War based on the war memorial in the town where I now live. In the course of this I had learned quite a few ways of compensating for the lack of service records. I discovered that I could find out a surprising amount by combining scraps of information from a wide range of sources, not all of them military. In several cases where there were 3 or 4 local men with the same name I was able to work out exactly which was which. So I decided I would try applying the same techniques to my search for my mother's Uncle Geordie.
Starting with the 12 CWGC results, I was able to eliminate several of them because they contained information that meant they could not be my man. Three of them died well before the date of the Poor Law application, two more were several years too old, one was too young, and another was in the Canadian Infantry. So I now had five men to choose from, less than half of the original number.
Next I consulted Soldiers Died in the Great War which provides very little personal information about each casualty, but will usually give each mans place of birth, and place of enlistment. Of my remaining five candidates, one was born in Morayshire, and recruited in Edinburgh, and one of the men listed just as G Donaldson by the CWGC turned out to be Gordon, not George. So now there were three who were born and recruited in Glasgow.
So far, so good, but I still needed to reduce the three to one, and then find some positive confirmation that the last one left was my great-uncle. I hoped that there would be a service record for one or two of them, with enough personal details to eliminate them from my enquiries, but no such luck. All of the deaths are listed in the GRO Index to War Deaths 1914-1921, but with no extra information, such as age at death, it was no help in establishing which of them might be the right one. But deaths of Scottish soldiers are also registered with GRO Scotland. The war deaths are part of the Minor Records on ScotlandsPeople, and the indexes include age at death. Unfortunately the indexes dont show regiment or service number, but by now I knew I was looking for a George Donaldson who died in 1917 or 1918, and there was only one whose age at death matched my great-uncle's date of birth, and this proved to be Pte George Donaldson 33164, 16th Battalion Highland Light Infantry, who died on 29 August 1918.
I was reasonably sure I had found the right man, but I wanted some proof. There is a wonderful online resource for Glasgow men who died during the First World War, the index to the Glasgow Evening Times Roll of Honour. The index gives the date when the death was announced in the newspaper, and the page number. I found the entry for a Pte George Donaldson at around the right date, and on my next trip to the Mitchell Library I was able to consult the newspaper in the hope it would provide the corroborating evidence I needed. I found the entry, and there was even a photograph! but then it was sharp intake of breath time; the caption read Pte George Donaldson, HLI (Killed); widow resides at 107 Maclean Street, Plantation, Glasgow.. I thought I had been so clever, narrowing down those twelve names to one, but now it looked as though I had made a mistake somewhere, because I was looking for a single man, not a married man, so now I would need to backtrack
Then I remembered one of my own rules Never assume. I had been assuming that he wasnt married, because no-one in the family had even mentioned a wife. But by the time I started researching, or even asking questions, there was no-one alive with a personal memory of him. There was an easy way to find out, I could look for the marriage, and there it was on ScotlandsPeople. He had married Mary Arthur in April 1916, and the marriage entry proved beyond all doubt that I had found the right man after all. Not only were the parents details correct, the wedding took place at the address where the Donaldson family had lived since at least 1909, 77 Elder Park Street, Govan.
George had not yet joined the army, because he is shown with his civilian occupation of carter. But conscription was well underway in 1916, so he may have joined or been called up soon after. He had only been only married for just over two years when he died, and probably spent most of that time away from his new wife. After he died, the Donaldson family probably lost touch with her, and I havent been able to find out what happened to her either (so far). When I showed my mother the results of my research, including the photograph, she said she could see a family resemblance. Its a very small, grainy picture, printed from a roll of microfilm that had seen better days, but I have a picture of my grandfather, David Donaldson, at around the same age and I think she was right (my mother was usually right!). I have put them both here for comparison.
As a postscript, I should mention some sources I didn't use, but which might be helpful to other people trying to do the same kind of research. You can search for soldiers' wills on ScotlandsPeople or on GOV.UK, for England and Wales, either in the soldiers' wills category, or among the regular probate indexes, which also contain some soldiers' wills. Finding the name of the next-of-kin could be just the vital piece of information you need. The National Army Museum's Register of Soldiers' Effects 1901-1929 on Ancestry also gives the name of the next-of-kin. This wasn't available to me when I did the research a few years ago, and might have confused me a bit because of course George Donaldson's next-of-kin was the wife I didn't know about at the time!
For soldiers who survived the war, the records I used to call my 'secret weapon' are the Absent Voters Lists which give a serviceman's home address along with his service number, regiment and battalion or equivalent unit. These don't all survive, but there is a good collection on Findmypast, and they are a real goldmine of information. There are also some wonderful local resources, so it pays to see what is available for the area where your soldier's family lived, such as a Roll of Honour, or a local or family history society may have researched the names on their war memorial. And of course there are newspapers, many of which are now on the British Newspaper Archive - although they don't yet include the Glasgow Evening Times (hint, hint!)
1 comment: Labels:Army,Glasgow,Mitchell Library,ScotlandsPeople Tuesday, 27 March 2018 Comparing BMD indexes for England and Wales: FindmypastBirth, 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 Mothers 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, Mothers 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 Findmypasts 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 mothers 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 cant 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 spouses 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 cant find your ancestors in these records, its 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.
No comments: Labels:Births,Certificates,Civil registration,Deaths,England and Wales,Findmypast,Indexes,Marriages,Online genealogy tools,Online searching,Registration districts Monday, 19 March 2018 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, 1916-2005England Wales, Civil Registration Death Index, 1837-1915 (free index)England Wales, Civil Registration Death Index, 1916-2007England 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 mothers maiden name. There is no way of searching by mothers maiden name only in the 1837-1915 birth indexes, but the search options for the 1916-2007 database includes a Mother field, for the mothers 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 mapThe 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 Atlass 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 arent 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 Atlass own landing page.
No comments: Labels:Ancestry,Births,Certificates,Civil registration,Deaths,General Register Office,Indexes,Maps,Marriages,Online genealogy tools,Registration districts Monday, 12 March 2018 Comparing BMD indexes for England and Wales: FreeBMD
FreeBMD should normally be the first port of call for anyone who wants to search the General Register Office (GRO) birth, marriage and death indexes. The exception would be when you want to use the more recent indexes; FreeBMD coverage is only up to 1983, the last when the paper indexes were the master copies. Also, since it is an ongoing volunteer project, it is not yet complete - although it is very close. The site has coverage charts that you can check before performing searches in the more recent indexes.
There a single search screen so you can see all your options at once. You can search births, marriages or deaths, any two of them, or all three at once. The search fields are; last name, forename(s), surname of spouse/mothers maiden name, spouses first name, age at death/date of birth, year and quarter, volumes and page. You can also filter a search to a specific district or county, and a date range. this is from-to range, by year and quarter, rather than a +/- by year, so you can define a very precise range, even single quarter.
The search engine will return results for the surname exactly as entered, and first names beginning with the letters as entered; so Ann will return results for Anne, Anna, Annabel etc, including any with middle names. This is the default search, but there are options to select exact search on first names, and phonetic search on surnames. A search for +Ann will produce results where names starting with Ann appear anywhere in the first name field e.g. Gertrude Annie as well as Annie Gertrude. This also works with initials, so +P in the First name(s) field produces results such as Percy, Annie Phyllis, Peter John G and Edith P V.
Birth searches can include the mothers maiden name (in the indexes from the September quarter of 1911). These searches will only return results from September 1911 onwards.Birth entries for twins will normally have the same page reference, but sometimes they will have consecutive numbers, where one entry is at the bottom of a page, and the other is at the top of the next page.
Marriage searches can include the surname and/or first name of the spouse - spouses surname is in the indexes from the March quarter of 1912, but the search will identify potential matches in the earlier records, i.e. where both names have the same reference, which means they appear on the same register page. There can be up to eight names on a page, so matching references do not guarantee that the two people married each other. You can restrict your search to those entries where the spouse's surname is guaranteedby selecting Identifiable spouses only.
Death searches can include a year of birth or an age. If you put an age at death, it will return results showing that exact age, and also where the age in the index is indistinct, or no age is shown all. The results will also include all entries before 1866, when the age was first included in the index. Results from the June quarter of 1969 will be those with dates of birth consistent with the age selected. You have the option to select recorded ages only to get exact results. If you select a year of birth instead of an age, the results before June 1969 wont be exact, but +/- 2 years.
None of the search fields is mandatory so you can search with just a forename, or even with no name at all. The search screen also has some other useful features; you can save searches, and download search results; if you click on Count instead of Find you will first see how many results your search will return; there is a maximum of 3000 that can be returned for a single search.
Search results are colour-coded, pink for births, green for marriages and grey for deaths; this is helpful when searching across more than one event type. The Registration District is a hyperlink to information about that district, and the page number is a hyperlink to a list of all the entries on that page - particularly useful for identifying possible spouses in the marriage search results.
The Info button links to information about the transcribers, but gives no more information about the entry itself unless there is a Postem - extra detail added by an individual, but which does not appear in the index. but if you don't need to click on 'Info' to find out of there is a Postem, because an envelope symbol will also appear against the entry. You can submit corrections via the Info button; a further symbol, of a pair of spectacles, will lead to an image of the original paper or parchment index page to help you do this.
More information about the site and the data can be found under Advanced Facilities, and there is a Help button for more detailed information on how to search. The search results page includes more links, including instructions on how to order a certificate from the GRO or a local register office. Even frequent users of the site can easily miss some of its many features, which are well worth exploring. if you subsequently use another site for GRO searches, the comprehensive background information found on FreeBMD will prove invaluable.
No site is perfect, but FreeBMD performs better than other sites in many ways, and is continually updated and improved.
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