Searching the new GRO indexes - share your tips!

[carol8353]

I find the insistence on a choice of Gender strange.  It can only reduce a trawl by about half at best, so why?  By far the biggest help is MMN, which (once one has found the correct one) makes collecting the rest of a family pretty easy.  I guess the restriction of ±2 years is to limit the size of a catch, but even that becomes a bit of a nuisance ....

I Just had a look for the death in 1837 of a lady,I ticked female and got a Charles,George and Elizabeth!!!

[Jon_ni]

While you cannot search by county specifically, you can add a volume number, which roughly correlates with the registration counties. A listing of volume to county numbers is here:
http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/civreg/GROIndexes

Above is easier to read but in case you missed it there is actually a link to a pdf on the GRO index search page beside the district box showing more detail (34 pages of).
https://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/certificates/images/GRO%20Registration%20District%20Book.pdf

Furthermore there seems to be some sort of relaxed use of District. For example try Smith male born Warwick 1900 some results are for "ALCESTER IN THE COUNTIES OF WARWICK AND WORCESTER" and when I specify Southam District I get results from Southampton too.

[Sloe Gin]

While you cannot search by county specifically, you can add a volume number, which roughly correlates with the registration counties.

That is a great tip, thanks!  Did not think of that, will save me doing double searches for Birmingham and Aston.

[Nick_Ips]

Carol, the GRO site explains that in some cases the gender wasn't recorded or couldn't be transcribed for the index, so those records will be shown in search results regardless of the gender selected in the search.

I just wish the search page didn't require this field!

[Scrumper]

Just ordered a PDF and it says Despatch Date (Est) 22 Nov 

That's slower than post.  Has anyone received a PDF yet?

[Nick_Ips]

I've just finished searching a batch of 74 infant deaths (age=0) from the old GRO index (i.e. FreeBMD data) using the new GRO data. These cover the timespan 1868-1954.

Of the 74 a total of 22 still have an age of 0, the remainder have a number in the range 1 - 11.

Although this is a fairly small sample, I wonder whether the absence of any numbers more than 11 means the number represents months, and anything under one month is being shown as a '0'?

The majority of the 74 records are pre-1900, but the post-1900 ones show a similar pattern to the earlier ones.

[clairec666]

Re ages in weeks/months shown incorrectly:
I don't know if the GRO have plans to correct this error, but I hope they don't show under-1s as 0. It's useful to have an accurate age for infant deaths.

[Hammerman]

Has anyone received a PDF yet?

Yes, I received some of mine Friday afternoon that I ordered on the Wednesday!

[Jon_ni]

a feedback form link is attached to the trial pdf's (ordered Wed, arrived Fri afternoon), asks for score and reason for score eg ease of use of index. I won't give 10/10 and will explain why so hopefully the next incarnation is even better - hopefully they will take some of it on board.