Searching the new GRO indexes - share your tips!

[Janelle]

I leave out the registration district - too hard sometimes to work it out for parts of populated places like Manchester if not familiar

Only 3 mandatory fields and one of those is the year which has +-2 years option so not too onerous searching the results for the maiden name of mother

Has anyone investigated the difference between "phonetically similar" and "similar sounding"?
I opt for the latter because I figure most English and British origin names in my family might be misspelt more than misunderstood. ??

And having ordered a pdf last night after reading about the new service here, and not noticing it for myself earlier in the week when I was shopping and bought paper certs ... I wonder which will arrive in my mailboxes first? The race is on ...

[clairec666]

Has anyone investigated the difference between "phonetically similar" and "similar sounding"?

I've not yet worked out the difference between the two - both of them have thrown up some results which are VERY far removed from the original. I prefer searching with wildcards, which isn't available, but fingers crossed they'll add this later

[Andrew Tarr]

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 ....

[Nick_Ips]

With regard to infant ages, the GRO "Most customers want to know" document states (FAQ 18)-

For infants who died within 12 months of birth, the age is shown as 0 in line with the microfiche indexes.

Therefore if there is a number given for the age of an infant death then it appears the error is that you are getting a value rather than the "0" the GRO intended.

In the circumstances it might be best not to complain too loudly that the days/weeks/months indication is missing 

[Andrew Tarr]

Therefore if there is a number given for the age of an infant death then it appears the error is that you are getting a value rather than the "0" the GRO intended.

The impression I get is that if an age has been recorded in months or weeks (not sure about days) that number will show in the GRO age column, and appear to represent years, which should show 0 or perhaps 1.  I have seen one example showing age as 19, which the corresponding church burial record proves to be months.

Searching for an age only finds records matching that number, whatever units it represents.

[Nick_Ips]

Yes, it seems the 'bug' is the website displaying a number which represents days, months or weeks, when the actual intention of the GRO to have been represent any age under 1 as a '0'.

Although the index won't tell you whether it is days, weeks or months it is still 'free' information which we didn't get on the old index 

[tillypeg]

I found a death age of 23 in the new index which was recorded in the Parish Register for burials as aged 1 yr 11 months and on FreeBMD as 1.

[Jon_ni]

The impression I get is that if an age has been recorded in months or weeks (not sure about days) that number will show in the GRO age column, and appear to represent years, which should show 0 or perhaps 1.

My experience is that is sometimes the case but not always sometimes the deaths do say 0 identically to FreeBMD. Post 1900 most seem to say 0 rather than have a numerical value (which should be months).
As you say as long as one is cross referencing to FreeBMD, Ancestry, Findmypast etc old indexes and verify it is the same person using the Vol & page nos it is additional useful info.

Has anyone investigated the difference between "phonetically similar" and "similar sounding"?

There was a reply about that earlier this week possibly in the lengthy locked thread but there are several similar on the go. The reply was basically google the terms but you get rather technical/mathematical info about replacing letters. Basically the Similar sounding is looser than Phonetic just as Ancestry's order is Exact/Sounds Like/Similar/Soundex.
I try to avoid using anything other than Exact on the GRO, find it takes ages & often times out.

[vrvt]

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

For example if I want to narrow my search to Nottinghamshire in the 1840s, I can just add volume 15 into the search. This will also bring up some districts in Leics/Northants/Rutland as well, but narrows the results a lot to the region of interest.