GRO indexes on gro.gov.uk !

[Guy Etchells]

Well this one came as a surprise to me: GRO indexes for births and deaths now searchable on gro.gov.uk - with mothers' maiden names pre-1911, and middle names spelled out in full even where the scanned/printed indexes only have middle initials!

Thanks to the m.m.n. I've already been able to track down the correct birth reg. for my one remaining great-grandparent, which I couldn't do on FreeBMD because there were too many possibilities.

Yes perhaps they are developing their index (testing are correcting & load calculating) to enable the public to purchase uncertified copies of birth death & marriage images in the "near" future.
Cheers
Guy

[..claire..]

Fabulous find

A big thumbs up to pstainthorp for spotting this👍👍

[bibliotaphist]

Its certainly a step in the right direction, but I feel the search criteria is a little restrictive. For instance it would be nice to be able to blanket search a maiden name without having to specify a specific year.

Cheers.

This issue was discussed further up the thread:

http://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=758727.msg6091928#msg6091928

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

[bibliotaphist]

Fabulous find

A big thumbs up to pstainthorp for spotting this👍👍

Credit where credit's due; I found out about it from the Facebook page of the Birmingham and Midland Society for Genealogy (https://www.facebook.com/Birmingham-and-Midland-Society-for-Genealogy-and-Heraldry-10150164553645160/)

[..claire..]

Nevertheless you alerted RC that's still a big thumbs up from me 👍 👍

[relatedtoturnips]

Its certainly a step in the right direction, but I feel the search criteria is a little restrictive. For instance it would be nice to be able to blanket search a maiden name without having to specify a specific year.

Cheers.

This issue was discussed further up the thread:

http://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=758727.msg6091928#msg6091928

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

Thanks for the heads up 

[bibliotaphist]

There's reports of a forthcoming limited GRO trial of a new service offering a limited number of uncertified copies of birth/death entries at a reduced price of £6.

[twinkles7]

great to have maiden names before 1911...............

[Deirdre784]

duplicate post