Genealogy Chat

Morning, Kate. I have found the Staffordshire site absolutely brilliant. It gave me loads of info that I hadn't been able to find elsewhere. The UKBMD site is also useful for giving links to other websites for specific counties.

Plus I should have mentioned before, but I forgot, Isle of Wight BMD will give you the mother's maiden name on birth registrations (even before 1911), or at least it does for my ancestor. Kate.

I'm always happy to sing the praises of UKBMD.org.uk. I think it's an excellent site - and I like the local BMD sites a lot - or most of them anyway. Some are a bit clunky, but they do cover (for free) ground that often isn't covered elsewhere. I like the fact that you can search for marriages on both names (on a lot of them), and that it tells you where a marriage took place - so you can opt to look for the parish registers and get a photo-copy of the page instead of buying a cert. The non-exact options on a lot of them are good: soundex/near/vague. Christine

Jay - if only! But as I said before, if you want to find out what is available for any particular county, just go to UK BMD and select that county. Kate.

Kate These sites are always my first port of call (Lancs and Cheshire) as I find them so much easier to negotiate than Free Ancestry. I have also found entries on these Sites which never got to the GRO!They have an online ordering service (well, Lancs does) which is at least as fast as the GRO, often much faster, and the local Registrars are more 'flexible' than the GRO. Another tip: when you use these Sites, dont forget to have a look at the many links on each County's Home Page (usually down the right hand side) - I have found many valuable treasures there, including someone's transcription of a load of baptisms she found tucked away in the middle of a burial register , which are not transcribed to the IGI. Olde Crone

Apart from the speed an extra infomation Kate, you will also find entries that are missing and some that have errors on GRO Bob

This is a really good tip as, dispite having done loads of research, I have never had anyone on my tree born in a place covered by any of these indexes, so I often get caught out when doing lookups for others....it doesn't occur to me to check if there is such an index!! Merry

Thanks for that Kate, I had not thought of that!! I have just used the Isle of Wight county BMD and found quite a few new rellies - so thanks again! Tammy

Kate, snap. TED XX

So often I see somebody having trouble tracking down a BMD entry which they could easily find on the county BMD site. Especially useful for marriages, and you don't have to pay to search their databases. You will almost always find that each marriage has a separate reference number on these sites, and most give you the spouse's name on the entry. Not many are complete, but they are always worth a try. I believe most have concentrated on marriages first because they are the entries that computerisation is most helpful for. Good ones that I know of are: Lancashire BMD, Yorkshire BMD, Isle of Wight BMD, Kent BMD (though you won't get the spouse's name unless you already know it), Staffordshire BMD, Cheshire BMD (the template for most of the others, I believe), Newcastle BMD, North East BMD, Durham BMD, Bath BMD. To find these and others, just look on UK BMD and choose the county you want www.ukbmd.org.uk and look down through the results till you find the county BMD site (if they have one); then you can click on the link provided. Happy hunting! Kate.