News today of a major development for England and Wales research. The GRO have put online new indexes to Births 1837-1915 and Deaths 1837-1957.
These seem to have been created from the original records/returns and include information never seen before in the GRO indexes. For all dates covered, Birth records have full names and the mother's maiden name, and Deaths include the age at death. (However, it's been found that with deaths, sometimes the figure shown relates to months rather than years, so it's a good idea to check your findings against the old indexes as held by FreeBMD and others; I don't know if this is something that will be corrected in due course.)
To access the indexes you need to sign up for an account on the GRO site https://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/certificates/default.asp or re-verify it if you already have one. On that page follow links to "search the GRO historic birth and death indexes".
You can read more about all of this here:
https://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/certificates/most_customers_want_to_know.asp#OnlineIndex
And there's more: in a few days they will be running a limited trial where you can order a pdf non-certified copy of an entry for just £6. Numbers are strictly limited and demand is expected to be high - and I don't seem to have a direct link to the official information on this.
But even without cheaper access to the full registration information, there are reports that the new index features are proving extremely useful in finding children who were born and died between censuses, and confirming speculative entries where no mother's maiden name was previously available.
These seem to have been created from the original records/returns and include information never seen before in the GRO indexes. For all dates covered, Birth records have full names and the mother's maiden name, and Deaths include the age at death. (However, it's been found that with deaths, sometimes the figure shown relates to months rather than years, so it's a good idea to check your findings against the old indexes as held by FreeBMD and others; I don't know if this is something that will be corrected in due course.)
To access the indexes you need to sign up for an account on the GRO site https://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/certificates/default.asp or re-verify it if you already have one. On that page follow links to "search the GRO historic birth and death indexes".
You can read more about all of this here:
https://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/certificates/most_customers_want_to_know.asp#OnlineIndex
And there's more: in a few days they will be running a limited trial where you can order a pdf non-certified copy of an entry for just £6. Numbers are strictly limited and demand is expected to be high - and I don't seem to have a direct link to the official information on this.
But even without cheaper access to the full registration information, there are reports that the new index features are proving extremely useful in finding children who were born and died between censuses, and confirming speculative entries where no mother's maiden name was previously available.
