General Chat

Thanks to Denis and Potty for your input.

Yes, you are spoilt in Scotland, Hugh!

I seem to remember there was a project a few years ago to digitise all the English and Welsh BMD entries but it was abandoned for lack of funding.

Depending where and when you are looking, there are records available that can sometimes help. Would you like to post some details? It would probably be better to post on the Find Ancestors board rather than this one, though.

It's often not necessary to go to Edinburgh or Glasgow to view these records. All registration offices in Scotland have access to the records for the whole of Scotland through the DIGROS system and the larger ones have facilities for researchers. The records that can be viewed include those not normally accessible on ScotlandsPeople. Always best to contact your local office in advance to see just what they can offer and what the charges are.

Kay????, can you advise on the facilities / charges at the Mitchell Library.
Do you get a computer workstation or are the records on microfiche and printable?
Can you download to a pen-drive? Do you need a Glasgow library ticket?
The Mitchell would probably be an easier / cheaper option for me as I live in the West.

Whilst we moan about the cost of £9.25 per certificate. What we fail to remember or some do not know is that the GRO although a Government Department is it totally self-funding, hence the cost.

So if we want our English/Welsh BMDs for free, then how would this be done.

As said on Ancestry some older London Marriage certificates are available for viewing.

Before you spend credits on GRO BMD index searches (or the images) see if they have been transcribed on http://freebmd.rootsweb.com/cgi/search.pl

Its an on going project, free to use, aiming to transcribe all entries from 1837 up to and including 1983.

http://www.freereg.org.uk/ is an alternative source for transcribed parish register events and may include more details from the original than familysearch.

Shirley they are £12 now and have been for ages......but if you visit Edinburgh and pay for a day ticket of £15 you can see all the registers up to 20013/14 and get a copy of all BDM regardless of timeline,as Hugh put for about 30p each.!!

Also the Mitchell Library in Glasgow has Scotland full BDM.

we cant walk into the GRO in Endland or Wales or Ireland for that matter and see the full entires,

I can get 5 full enties of BDM downloads for £7 from Scotlandspeople,a bargain,,,compared to £9-25 each event from E/W GRO.....

The only drawback is deaths in Scotland as registers didnt exsist till 1855.but if there was a headstone,then 9/10 the womans name appears as,,,ie- Margaret Grant--wife of Donald McDonald...an indication of her maiden name.or,,,,,,,Hugh Grant son of Margaret McDougal and Hugh Grant,.....it would appear that the parent were never married but that is how many headstones are worded,,,,,,,I supose because of so many repeated names in people who are un-related.

After about 1911 though you can't download the images. You have to buy them too through Scotland's People. At £10 per cert. so it's not all low cost on there .

If you are lucky and a relative married in the London area to 1921 you can see the parish copy of the marriage .

The costs of scanning in all BMD ,s is probably more than the GRO is wiling to pay for . England/Wales is a much larger area so the volume of BMD,s must be huge

It's the way things are at the present I,m afraid

Kay????, many thanks for your info on the England / Wales GRO stance on releasing scans (images) of BMD Register Entries.

Just to clarify, I have never paid £15 for a certified Extract (except in the case of an immediate family event) nor would I pay £9.25 as, in Scotland, I can download an image of the original Register Entry for £1.40 which contains even more info than an Extract. For example for a Marriage Entry you get:-

Full names, ages, professions, addresses & marital status of Bride & Groom.
Names (inc. maiden surnames) and occupations of both parents of Bride & Groom
and whether any parents are deceased.
Name of Minister / Priest / Registrar who conducted the marriage.
Names of 2 witnesses (often family members of Bride & Groom). - all for £1.40.

Maybe we're spoiled in Scotland but note that this is from the official Scottish Government website at the GRO in Edinburgh, who refuse to sell the data to other Genealogy sites. If you travel to the GRO and pay £15 for a day-ticket you get a computer workstation where you can search as much as you like and download
unlimited original images to a pen-drive for 30 PENCE each.

The difference in going in person is that there are time limits for online images
(Birth 100 years, Marriage 75 years, Death 50 years) but in person you can download images up to 2013.

It's no wonder I read recently that the English GRO moved all their archives saying it was not viable as a visitor centre due to poor attendance, when you have to pay £9.25 per record.

I just feel a little short-changed when all my credits get me are images of an index entry with no date, just a Quarter, with the exception of a Death Index which, strangely, gives you the Date of Birth (which a Birth Index doesn't) but doesn't give you the Date of Death. Crazy!

AnnCardiff, firstly I have the full Birth Entry image for the person I used to test the FamilySearch.org so I don't need the info, purely done to test it.

For the test I used: Patrick Edward McGuire
born 1908
in Coatbridge, Lanarkshire, Scotland (a town & Reg. District)

Probably the nearest you could get for England and Wales are the images for marriages taken from Parish Registers. Ancestry (subscription) do hold a number of data bases of these, but it does depend when and where the relatives married.

If they married in a Registry Office then the only source of an image is the GRO. (£9.25 per copy)

Parish register baptisms don't/rarely give the maiden name of the mother or the date of birth, and parish burial registers are hit and miss as far as details are concerned.

https://www.deceasedonline.com/ have an increasing number of images for burials and cremations. The more recent ones can provide the name and address of the person who made the arrangements. The site can be searched for free, then pay to view the image.

Hugh ,
Its been an on going fight proposed that the BDM registers with time restrictions of course for England/Wales be avalible in their original form from the register office entries but the General Register Office will not release them to be scanned for online download,
It would of course swell the coffers as more people would be inclined to buy via credits instant images for a fair sum rather than as at present,,,,,,,,,,,apply,pay and wait at £9-25 each.

It costs the GRO an average of 50p to reproduce a copy,,,,,the rest is in admin costs, acording to the GRO.

The sale of BDM certified copies of England and Wales fill lots of piggy banks,



:-D.

At present to cover a B-M-D certified copy of each for one person from GRO costs £27-75 incl postage,,,,,,@ £45 you are using the wrong channels for purchasing,

LDS have scans of Parish Registeres -not details held by the G.R.Offices of Births/Deaths /Marriages for England and Wales.

can you give us the details in case we have more luck?

AnnCardiff, it's not quite the same. I did a test on FamilySearch.org by searching for the Birth of an Uncle in 1908. I gave the exact year and town of birth, and searched with and without his middle name. It produced no results.

Strangely, the scan I have of his Birth Entry from Scotland's People (official Scottish Government site) was photographed for them by the LDS, the same people who run FS.org!

The scans I'm referring to are photographs of the original handwritten pages from the Birth, Marriage & Death Registers which were used in the local Registration Offices when the events were first recorded. In Scotland these original Registers were then deposited at the GRO in Edinburgh. The info is taken from these scans when you order an Extract in order to preserve the original delicate Registers.

In a deal with the Registrar General for Scotland going back to the 1950s all BMD Registers, Censuses, Wills etc. were filmed by the Genealogical Society, Utah who were allowed to keep a copy of all records for their own purposes in return for their services. This process was repeated in many countries around the world and is ongoing. The copies they retained formed the International Genealogical Index (IGI) of over 2 Billion records, a backup of which is kept inside a mountain vault in Utah. I believe this process was also done for England, Wales & Ireland so would expect the scans to be available on some site as in Scotland (subject to age limitations on the records).

I get all the info I want from the free LDS website - familysearch.org

I'm not sure what scans you're referring to. In Wales & England we normally get the information we are looking for from certificates purchased from the GRO. They cost £9.25 each.

I am Scottish born so much of my research is done on Scotland's People who (for credits) provide scans of the original Registrar's BMD entries, which provide much valuable info (exact dates, ages, parent's names & marriage details, exact addresses etc.).

I was therefore disappointed to find that this site (and I assume others) only provide transcriptions and images of indices which only give the Quarter of the event, the Registration District and no details of parents. It seems you have to shell out a small fortune for Extracts if you want the full info, which is not affordable for the amateur researcher with a large tree. For comparison, a scan of a Scottish BMD Registrar's Entry costs £1.40 and contains all the info (and sometimes more) that is shown on an Extract costing £15.00 each. I certainly can't afford £45 for each person's full BMD.

To my point - as I do have relations with English / Welsh BMDs can anyone direct me to a site which provides proper scans of these Registrar's Entries for my credits? I presume the Genealogical Society, Utah have filmed these as they have done in Scotland and many other countries and continue to do so.