GRO indexes on gro.gov.uk !

[Girl Guide]

This is really wonderful.  I had a quick look last night but will be doing a more careful search today.  I have the delightful combination of White/Smith in the births!!
 
However I am hoping to narrow down the possibilities by using this facility and the registration districts.

The only slight grumble I have is the narrow year search, two years +/- which increases the search time taken.

[andrewalston]

A couple of cautions:-

1. The database is not complete. I have a couple of birth entries from FreeBMD (confirmed from the images - handwritten ones) which don't appear.

2. The age at death may be in years or MONTHS. I've cross checked a few already with LancashireBMD and CheshireBMD.

Only checked early ones so far.

[carol8353]

I have finally found my grandad's 9th sibling,I was always told that both my grandparents came from families of 10 children,but with a common surname never could find the missing one. She was born only months after her older brother in 1899 but died in the same 1/4.All the surviving children have 3 christian names,she was only given one.So they knew she wouldn't survive I think.

This will be ideal for those for whom the 1911 census says more children born that you've found.

Shame you can only search within 2 years of a date and you have to specify male or female though.

[nanny jan]

Thank you! 

 I've just found one of those little ones whose short lives miss the census records.......I wondered why there was a bigger than usual gap between the children.


Nanny Jan

[candleflame]

Am I doing something wrong? I'm activated, have the search form, got all excited, put in what I wanted to search for and nothing. So I put  in one I already have the certificate for , just so I could see what comes up ( early 1900's) and it said no results found?

Edit - I took the registration district out and out the GRO code in but not a page number and I got results! Now to see if I can find who I'm looking for.

[AntonyMMM]

I have been using this for some weeks (as one of a number of researchers asked to test the system by GRO).

It certainly is a great step forward when looking to track down those elusive ancestors or eliminate possible matches - I suspect quite a few people may find that entries they have assumed to be correct from the old indexes are not actually their family at all !

The search engine is quite restrictive, and that is something that has certainly been fed back to GRO - but I do know they were worried about the system being overloaded with searches (which is also why they didn't announce the launch in advance)  - hopefully  they will relax the mandatory fields once the system has settled down.

Because of the restrictions on searching I have found that for speculative searches with limited information  it is still better to use FreeBMD to find potential matches and then use the GRO system to rule them in/out. It is interesting to see that there are quite a few entries where the two indexes disagree but I believe that the GRO index is new, it is not a copy of that used by FreeBMD, but has been re-done from the digitised images of the GRO registers, so "should" be more accurate.

There are more changes coming shortly - keep an eye on the GRO site.......

[PrawnCocktail]

Hasn't half slowed down now - first few searches an hour ago were very quick!

[candleflame]

I am very happy as I have now found the two most obvious ones in our trees for which there were too many possibilities to buy all the certificates! Now to locate which of the many deaths are the most likely - these were two born and died before the 1911 census.
You do realise by posting this link, the whole of this weekend is taking on a very different shape 
Many thanks for letting the rest of us know about it!

[Lostris]

Many thx for posting this information - finally found a missing Uncle (indicated by the 1911 census) ...