Genealogy Chat

Cheers Alan, Actually I'm a little green & mouldy now, but my husband still loves me!!! But in answer to your reply the 1837online is not just that year!, it does go up 2000+, my son was actually born in 1992, I just look really old & haggard after being married 20 odd years and only having a 10 year old!(culture shock!) Kim

There are two completely separate issues here, the post-1984 computerised data and the pre-1984 images of paper indexes. The post-1984 data is described as "dirty" and in fact it seems to be a total mess. That's the GRO's fault, not the website's, and it's no guide to the state of the older data. In the image data, yes, nothing is totally bug-free, there are still a few missing pages and blank pages, but not many. They're obvious from the gap in the alphabetical order, and if you tell them, they fix em. If the alphabetical sequence is continuous and your rellie isn't there, that's a different kind of problem. Most often it means you're looking in the wrong year or the wrong district. It can also mean you're looking for the wrong name or the wrong spelling. There are all sorts of reasons why the name on the birth certificate might be different from the name used at marriage or in later life. In some cases your chances of finding the right b/cert are pretty remote, but it doesn't mean it's not there. Actual non-registrations are rare after about 1850, and indexing errors are also rare. These things only account for a small proportion of all the cases where a pre-1984 b/cert appears to be missing. Far more often the problem turns out to be a mismatch between what's there and what's expected

Can you tell me the name of the 1837 website I have never heard of it til now?

Go to "links" on the left. The web address is under Family Research.

oh heck! What have I started?! Thanks for all the replies by the way. I am just assuming that it is good up to about 1980 as it seems to be from then on that I am having problems finding people. Having said that, I looked in every quarter from 1965 to 1973 for a wedding (Don't you just love Visa Cards?!!). The first child was born in 1972 so I just worked around that. I have finally got the people involved to give me the information themselves (they refused first time round) and the wedding was in 1971 - so why didn't it show up?????? The question remains....is it complete?

Well, for a C of E wedding, the parson was supposed to write out a transcript afterwards and send it off to the GRO. For other events, the local register office used to send off transcripts quarterly. At the GRO they had to sort all the sheets and bind them into books and index them and type out the indexes. All done by hand and subject to normal human error So if you're asking, has the whole process always been 100% error-free, then no. But they were careful, by normal standards, otherwise they'd have been in big trouble long ago, as people often need their b/certs for important reasons. The error rate doesn't make the index unusable, otherwise the job would fall apart (the GRO itself uses the same indexes that they publish), and unless you've been walking under ladders there's no reason you should be unluckier than the rest of us. Nearly all the time, for pre-1984 events, if the info you've got really does match what's actually written in the register, the entry can be found in the indexes.

If you go on to 1837online and click the help link and then 'about the records' it states that it is a complete record of the original indexes and that their are no knowm omissions.

Hmmm. I found granny's birth in freeBMD born 1873 - she died in 1972. Loads a munny! and not a trace of either in 1837. I'm also beginning to think she lived 'over the brush' as I can't find a marriage on either.

Plese dont' tell me I was in agony for 6 hours and the little rascal is a figment of my imagination. Cause he is still not on the 1837online. Kim