Using a Free Government Service to Research Your Family Tree!
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 11 ต.ค. 2024
- The General Records Office in the UK is a repository for ordering birth, marriage and death certificates, as well as other important documents, such as passports. But you can also use it as a free, powerful tool to find long lost ancestors in your family tree.
If you know all the background, skip to around the 5 minute mark to get cracking!
I'm pleased to say you & I work in almost exactly the same way, so I didn't actually learn anything new LOL
One thing people need to bear in mind is that - if they've calculated the birth year from census age - they can easily be a year out. A person who is 30 years old in April 1881 _may_ have been born in 1851, but may also have been born in 1850...and that's provided the correct age is recorded on the census!
Also remember that the GRO index dates are the date of registration. Somebody who is born or dies late in December may well not be registered until January. I had one instance where it appeared that a girl's mother had died the year before the girl was born. Her mother died in childbirth in December - the mother's death was registered in December, but the child's birth wasn't registered until January. (This caused some people to mistakenly ascribe the girl's step-mother as her birth mother, as her father remarried within a year)
Good advice, and as we know the names may have been spelt differently on numerous records.
I have used the GRO search to "interrogate" the records when I couldn't find say a death date and yes it does work. However the drawback with their search engine is that you have to do it in 2 year stages and sometimes you have to go backwards even from an known date for the entry to appear. This is where I find the search engine at the Free BMD website so handy as I've used that with a time span of say 30 years and found the actual dates for my own cousins when I have entered just the surname. Unlike checking real Family Trees where living people are marked private I can then take that info and search the GRO knowing I can target the narrow timespan for each person. Where there is a will there is a way.
Thank you for sharing this, I had no idea it existed, and it looks to be really helpful. Many thanks for your time in explaining, and for showing how to navigate through etc. Absolutely brilliant.
Do not forget that although registration was introduced in 1837 it was not actually compulsory to register a birth until 1875 so you might be looking for a registration that does not exist.
That might explain a couple of things inmy research
These records are available as PDFs to be emailed to you. "PDF's for historical digitised civil registration records held by GRO (birth entries from 1837 to 1919 and death entries from 1837 to 1957)" Other certificates including these are paper copies which are posted to you under normal circumstances.
You can now purchase a digital copy of a certificate for £1.50, which is available immediately.
I think you've confused 2 services. Digital images of most birth and death certificates is £2.50 per image and available online as soon as payment is made.. If you have a poor result you can contact them and they refund your payment and amend the options to exclude that option. However if you want a digital copy of a probate which includes the will that is £1.50 and takes several days to be available .
Is that for English certificates from GRO?
@@fabianmckenna8197 UK birth and death entries only provided the dates have been digitised AND they have a clear image of that entry. It has saved me a fortune!
A trick i learned from somewhere is just to check the nearest 05 and 10 dates with +/-2 years. If you use those all the time its less likely you will make a mistake in putting the correct year in. Ive found it helpful.
Thank you for your video, very informative, I would just like to ask what you would do if you didn’t know the mothers maiden name
I just ordered a hard copy birth certificate for my grandfather. They now cost £11 in 2024. Almost doubled in price...
Even the 3 month registration date might not capture the birth. A child born at the end of December will probably be register in January in the next calendar year.
it would have been considerate if you had put the link in the description section
Sadly, it seems The Gro index online shows that the years from 1957 to 1984 is missing.
I was told on a group that there was no funding for every year to be digitised and the situation hasn't changed so still viewed as a low priority
The GRO don't let you search marriages?
Helpful thank you.
This is pants. I've put in all the accurate details for my ancestors and all I get is no results and I know fine well they are there and I've not put in anything incorrectly. I changed the area in case wrong it still took none of it for a selection of people not their births or deaths nothing.
I had a similar issue for a relative that I knew existed. The GRO index had the E in the name mistranscribed as a C. So Petrie became Petric. Once you see the original document you can see why from the handwriting. This could be a possibility?
Try searching just the surname or searching with no district specified. yes it does try your patience especially when they have input a spelling mistake when transcribing. I have a Haverfordwest appearing as "Hamford West" so the machine is very confused while it searches for this non existent Office.
I tried this but the GRO website has completely changed since you uploaded this video :(
Yes, it's changed - but not that much. You may have to just look around a bit to find things, but they're still there.
Yep same here ! can't seem to get a way into it without credit card registration etc
It has hardly changed so this video is still valuable to complement the instructions on the site.
@@Andy-lm2zp You do not need to give any card details to undertake a search. Just log in and go to "Search the GRO Indexes"
What if you dont know the persons your looking for? but just using your surname helps?
It might be easier to use this site first, www.freebmd.org.uk/ You can try searching with a surname on GRO but it can be laborius going through 5 years at a time. It helps reduce the results if you are able to add a maiden name for the mother and of course if you know where the event took place that reduces results as well. The FreeBMD site is more flexible to use to search.
The freebmd site has other advantages.
Unlike the GRO it can be searched by Maiden name only....If you do not believe me ...Just try it.....Yes omit the surname.....This means that you can identify potential spouses/fathers.....These "possibles" can then be "tested" on a subsequent census etc.......
Once you have the fathers surname .....you can search for other children.....or the marriage... but see later
Then try leaving the year range blank......this might identify all/some of the siblings......
Again you can search by county, with no district
The marriage probably took place a year or two prior to the birth of the first legitimate child
Now move onto the marriage search.......Depending on how common the surname is........try leaving the first and last name of the spouse blank.......not hard if you do not have them........again this will identify potential spouses...to test
In a lot of situations you will have the first name of the mother, but not her maiden name....perhaps from a christening......So enter the first and last name of the husband plus the first name of his wife.....and see the amazing results......to check out
Why does this work ? (except for common names like Smith), well the mathematical odds are in your favour due to the large variation in surnames and first names, there will be a lot of John Smith=Mary Jones, but likely no other Alonzo Arbon=Hepzibah Dankworthy
This means that you can now trace a female line almost as easy as a male line......so go to your tree.......find all females that you have not found the husband for......and give it a try.....if it fails it may indicate they did not marry, which is a clue in itself......if they appear in a census in their teens, but not in the following census with their parents - they may be in service and still single, living elswhere - but also might have got married.....or are deceased
I find that the BMD search is even better on FindMyPast, but not sure if the search works if you do have an account.
I always advise that you check out your findings on the GRO site .....it seems to give full middle names for the birth search, whilst other sites may just give an initial
can you please update! also on gov website is missing a lot of years, why is that?
If you mean those records that were digitalised then there was a project named DoVE (Digitisation of Vital Events), which was shelved in 2010. This was only partially completed, with marriage records not digitised. If you mean records actually missed off e.g. over 7,000 birth entries from volume 4A of the July-September quarter of 1881 had been duplicated in volume 3B, whilst over 5,000 entries that should have appeared in 3B were missing. There were up to 11,000 births missing from volume 11A in the October-December quarter of 1902.
In the final quarter of 1860, 4,000 birth entries were missing from volume 6C and had been replaced by 3,000 duplicated entries from volume 4B in the April-June quarter.
About 2,000 death records from volume 1C in the January-March quarter of 1863 were gone, and had been replaced by 4,500 records from volume 2C. As your question is not clear it is hard to answer precisely.
Sound is poor.