Access to England & Wales BMD Registers

The reason I set up this subforum is so that we can discuss how we want to be able to search for births, marriages, and deaths in the future. The existing indexes won't disappear - too many people have copies - but there are enormous limitations.

Right now we're restricted to searching on the fields that were indexed at the time, but if the BMD registers are transcribed they could be indexed on many more fields - the names of marriage witnesses, the names of the fathers of the bride and groom, the place of birth, the occupation of someone who died (or in the case of a widow, the name and/or occupation of their husband) are just a few.

I'd like to know which new fields you would find it most useful to be able to search on, and how that new search would help. If you have a specific example of where this would have worked in the past or might work in the future, and you're prepared to share it with the world, then so much the better.

Some of the local BMD projects allow more sophisticated searches - if you have benefited from them please let us know, and again if you have a specific example please include it.

 

Most overwhelmingly, for me, would be the addition of parents' names in the births index & the father's name in the marriages index. Places would also be a valuable addition. Deaths are a bit more problematic as there is so little information recorded on the certificates.

 

Do you mean the place of birth - following on from my earlier post - or the venue of a marriage?

We often think that, but in fact there's about the same amount of information on a death certificate as on a birth certificate (see this SoG guide). However how useful it is varies - my favourites are the ones where the informant was a married daughter.

 

Regarding places - both!

Regarding death certificates - being an Aussie, I'm spoilt. Our death certificates, particularly in Victoria, provide names of parents, spouse/s & children. They also include a burial place. Of course, it all depends on the informant. Sometimes the details are 'not known' or poppycock!

 

We need to focus our attention on what we can achieve in practice - unfortunately nobody can change what has been recorded in the historical registers. The aim of this informal consultation is to come up with suggestions for how the information that is available in the registers can be searched, so that we can find as many as possible of the certificates of interest to us (including those we don't even know to exist, such as second or bigamous marriages, and children who died in infancy).

 

Is there a reference site somewhere Peter that lists every possible fact you can find on each of the certificate types? That would serve as a guide to what is useful and what isn't.

Responders also need to bear in mind that whilst all certificates may well have a specific fact eg: witness. If that fCt has never previously been indexed then it is a mammoth task to index it. Remember it's a balancing act, amount of time and effort to index each field and in particular verify the indexing, vs the usefulness of the index.

Whilst it is likely to be a one off and therefore you'd want everything indexed when it's done this time round, you have to bear in mind that indexing fields not currently in the index/database will delay the release of a site you can search on by years.

Also bear in mind that such a project may advesely affect the revenue of companies like FMP and Ancestry so they might not be entirely keen on a project unless the suggestion is that there is a government program to index the data that then leases to companies that wish to commercialise the data.

That approach has some significant benefits, eg: might well be supported by those companies rather than oppoeed as it could be lucrative for them. There is also a very significant downside and that is what mechanisms would be in place to correct errors in the index, and who is responsible for correcting those errors.

There will undoubtably be errors in any new index it would be impossible to avoid that, however there needs to be careful though as to what procedures are available to correct errors. They would not want 1001 people emailing every day pointing out X is wrong as we all know there is a wide variety of user intellect out there. From the experienced dedicated researchers such as this forum readers, ie: those that would diligently look for something multiple ways then find it mis-indexed and want to help by alerting someone that the index needs fixed. At the other end of the scale someone types in the name of their ancestor doesn't find them first try and complains it must be wrong. Or worse those incredibly clueless people that could find the entry and complain because "our family never spelt out name that way" so it must be wrong.

How to filter the wheat from the overwhelming flood a chaff is perhaps quite a challenge. My fear is they would simply ignore the genuine research thinking it was just another complaint if there wasn't a rigeous process in place. What that might be I can't think of a solution just now.



TLDR: indexing takes time and would delay launch of site, correcting mis-indexed needs to be possible without being overwhelming.


PS. TLDR stands for: Too Long? Didnt't Read?

 

There is - I provided a link to it yesterday:

Unfortunately the SoG site is down for a few days whilst they redevelop it, but in the meantime you'll find the guide here in the Internet Archive.

 

For me there are two potential benefits - the first is being able to find events that I can't find at the moment. This requires better search options, which is in turn dependent on more fields being indexed.

The second benefit is potentially being able to afford certificates for all my relatives and not just direct ancestors.

 

A VERY small part of their costs - I looked into this several years ago and published the results in my newsletter. The saving would have been just 23p at that time, though no doubt a bit more now due to increases in postage rates, but still hardly worth worrying about.

Why shouldn't we have a system that's at least as good and at least as cheap as the one they've had in Scotland for 10 years?

 

Uncle024 makes a good point about the slashing of budgets. Unlike Scotland that decided differently England has recently decided it would like more budget slashing so as Uncle024 points out investment in new services is extremely unlikely.

Sadly the most powerful argument, ie: that investment at this stage will actually generate revenue longer term, is likely to fall on deaf ears as all hands are to the pump looking to see what can be cut. Indeed it's not out of the realms of possibility that the entire registration system could be sold off to raise short term funds.

 

Since the General Register Office operates at a substantial loss this would be a pretty smart move, though I'm not sure it's very likely.

Although there are lots of cuts in budgets I've noticed at least two areas where previously paid for services are now free: the DVLA no longer charges a £25 annual fee for registrations held on a retention certificate, and Companies House has a beta site where previously chargeable information is now free. There may well be other examples - these were both unheralded. It may be a good omen for us.....