Genealogy Chat

Thanks John for the tip, very useful - haven't found anyone yet but am hopeful, Selena

Thank you very much for that invaluable info John. That's a much better strategy than my random guesses on the IGI search. I do wish I'd known this months ago! Marian

Go to the web site above and click on the county you want and there they are

John Sorry to be thick but where do you find batch numbers?

Hi John, Thank you for your useful hints I will certainly try some of your little tricks. What a great helpful site this is. Anne-Marie

A useful site and instructions. Long winded and not for those who want to do in 10 mins. Apologies to those who know this but I think it may help Newbies. Copy and paste. http://freepages(.)genealogy(.)rootsweb(.)com/~hughwallis/IGIBatchNumbers/CountryEngland(.)(htm#PageTitle) Using the batch number is, vital, since..... 1) It gets you all the entries for a particular surname in a particular parish within a particular period. Experiment with changing the last digit to get other batch numbers and also try changing a C (for births and christenings) to an M (marriages) or a P (usually earlier periods) for a printed transcript. 2) The batch numbers C, J or K for births/christenings, M or E for marriages and P, sometimes for both, indicate official extracts from parish registers or bishop's transcripts, and thus filter out all the garbage of the private patron submissions. Now, here is something else you can try. This is a little trick I discovered by accident a few years ago and am willing to share with the list.... In the IGI custom search box enter only the region and a batch number and NOTHING ELSE at all. Press search and (provided you have the correct batch no.) you will get the entire register up! You can then scroll through all the entries in screens of 200 at a time. This may take a while but I have found this valuable for finding that elusive entry where an ancestor is "hiding" under a variant of the surname that has become so garbled it isn't recognised by the LDS's usual standard surnames arrangement. For instance, I was looking for ancestors at Kirkby Malham called BRACEWELL and thought I had found them all until I pulled the trick of getting the whole register up. I then found another one lurking as Ellen BRAITEWELL and she turned out to be the vital one I needed, since later further research in the printed registers established that she had come from another parish, thus making an earlier link back to another place. The LDS doesn't tell you about this trick in its Help file but I discovered it by accident when experimenting a few years ago. The only drawback is that for some reason not explained you are limited to a maximum of 5,000 entries. This should normally be sufficient in a rural parish but may run out somewhere in the middle of the alphabet in a large city parish. The trick then is to enter common forenames like John, William, Mary, Elizabeth etc and hope you get some surnames in the later stages of the alphabet. Everybody clear?

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