Family Historian User Group

I've been searching for a marriage certificate for a male relative and am fairly certain I've found him in June 1850.  The only problem is that although I have the district and volume the page number is given as 11*, meaning whoever transcribed it couldn't read the last digit.  I tried viewing the original on 1837online and couldn't read it either but think it's either an 8, 5 or 3.  Does anyone know if there's any way of getting all 3 checked for the price of 1 or do I just have to bite the bullet and order all 3 in turn, hoping for a partial refund if I'm wrong?  [confused]

ID:783

As you know the name, month and year can you not order just one certificate at the higher cost of £11.50 which includes the GRO search fee.

I had the same problem and asked the GRO how to handle it - I was told that I could order by phone, explaining the situation and they would only charge the normal fee (£8.50) or I could order online and quote the other possible numbers in the Reference checking section.  This would only cost the normal £7.

Alternatively, do you know his spouse's name?  If so you could crosscheck by looking at her entry.

Happy hunting

Russell

I had the same problem of an unreadable page reference and used the phone-in facility at GRO. the person on the other end took details of the problem. It worked very well; indeed that certificate came faster than one ordered on-line.

I had a similar problem this week where the reference just showed an underscore (_) where the page number should have been.

However, when I looked at the index page myself by looking up surname, quarter etc I found that with close inspection I could read it ok. I suppose the transcribers can't spend forever looking at each entry but we have longer than them.

I think it's also worth mentioning that the scans used by FreeBMD are different (and usually of inferior quality) to the ones available on Ancestry. I've had the same problem as above but have always overcome it by looking at an alternative source. I'm sure some kind soul will do a lookup for you if you don't have Ancestry access.