Genealogy Chat

BMD certificates Can anyone tell me if there is anywhere that you can go & just look at the certificates, rather than having to buy them. I have a long list of references I've been making fron the BMD indexes & thought that I'd be able to look up the certificates rather than having to purchase them all. Any help would be appreciated Clare

In a word.....no. Not in England and Wales. Reg

Oh! thats a shame I was planning a trip to the records office on Saturday. Thanks anyway Reg.

You can look up the marriages at the records office but not the births or the deaths. You can however look for the baptisms and burials instead. Baptisms will give the parents names but not mothers maiden name like a birth cert would and sometimes they also give date of birth too. You will need to know which parish to look in though. Julie

You can contact your local family research centre, run by the church of latter day saints (no idea why, but they provide the service, so lets not complain) (search on ' family search') and if you have the reference you get from looking at the records you've been seeing, you can go and look at microfiches of the records - not the actual certificates, but all the details you need. They don't have them all in stock, you need to tell them the reference of what you need, the town etc, b, m, or d, and they get them in for you. I've never used it but someone I've been exchanging mails with has used it regularly in their area to veiw records for the other end of the country, and they swear by it. Don't know if that helps, but worth passing on Angela

Hi Clare, you can also find the bmd parish records held on the mormon site in most of the main libraries, they have to be viewed on microfilch and are listed under IGI .

Oh, if only there was!!! Unfortunately, no such luck in this lifetime!!