Family Historian User Group

Hi all,

Was wondering how accurate people found the BMD indexes please?

I've been trying to find the death certificate of my great grandmother Hannah Layton (nee Cox) who died 27/9/1962. She lived in Tottenham area and was buried there. But i can find no record of her

Should i expect all deaths to be recorded or are the indexes known to be incomplete please?

Thanks for any advise

ID:2086

Sorry, please ignore the above

Just tried the findmypast indexes and found her on my first try!

Thanks
Tony

As a newcomer this matches my experience and makes me wonder about costs - I just subscribed to ancestry but still find that findmypast is more accurate where it has data.

How dear is this all going to end up being!

Add in the 1901 census tokens...

Remember Ancestry have two index sets. The proper GRO ones, the same as Find My Past and the FreeBMD ones, which are fairly good pre 1900 and poor after that.

RalfofAmber said:
As a newcomer this matches my experience and makes me wonder about costs - I just subscribed to ancestry but still find that findmypast is more accurate where it has data.

How dear is this all going to end up being!

Add in the 1901 census tokens...

That's the odd thing, because i did look in the full gro bmd on ancestry, but couldn't find it. However, just had another look and it is there... I must of been getting punch drunk from all the searching i was doing yesterday

It's worth remembering that the BMD indexes were originally made by hand by copying all the quarterly registers (originally hand written by a registrar's clerk, from mostly verbal reports) onto seperate pages, sorting these (by hand) by name, and then copying these again onto the alphabetical lists. Some of these have then been re-typed in the early 20th century. It's not surprising that hard to read or unusual names are often mis-indexed. These lists have then been transcribed a century later by volunteers at FreeBMD (which is what Ancestry use for their 'partial' indexes).

For the 'Complete' index ranges, they have re-transcribed the first and last names from each alphabetical index page, but they've made a mistake... The last name on the page is often a correction on the original, intended to be inserted further up. This means that any names on that page coming after the correction alphabetically are not found. It's sometimes worth looking for a name after the one you want and then browsing backwards.

Also of course, not everyone was correctly registered in the first place. Most notably, people who died without family present. We've found more than one example of people on censuses who's names and/or ages are unknown, so their death registers are unlikely to be correct, 'The Widow Jones' for example, and even 'Strange Man' sleeping one census night in one of my ancestors' neighbour's barn.

P.S.

(not that I have any particular reason to defend Ancestry as compared to any of the other sites, but to be fair...) Q3 1962 LAYTON, Hannah, 88, Wood Green 5f/395 is certainly there and correctly indexed

ChrisBowyer said:
P.S.

(not that I have any particular reason to defend Ancestry as compared to any of the other sites, but to be fair...) Q3 1962 LAYTON, Hannah, 88, Wood Green 5f/395 is certainly there and correctly indexed

No need to rub it in [wink]

Further to the comments that Chris has made, research by Michael Whitfield Foster in his book 'A Comedy of Errors' in 1998 where he was given access to the BMD certificates show that there are a very large number of errors and problems with the indexes. The local register office indexes are considered to be far more accurate. It is well worth looking to see if the ukbmd project has information for the county you are interested in. I use the Cheshire BMD indexes a lot for my research and they have excellent coverage, I believe it is complete for births, marriages and deaths up to around 1900 and much later for many areas of Cheshire. The Lancashire equivalent is also beginning to be very useful. Worth a try and they are free too.

Nick Walker said:
Further to the comments that Chris has made, research by Michael Whitfield Foster in his book 'A Comedy of Errors' in 1998 where he was given access to the BMD certificates show that there are a very large number of errors and problems with the indexes. The local register office indexes are considered to be far more accurate. It is well worth looking to see if the ukbmd project has information for the county you are interested in. I use the Cheshire BMD indexes a lot for my research and they have excellent coverage, I believe it is complete for births, marriages and deaths up to around 1900 and much later for many areas of Cheshire. The Lancashire equivalent is also beginning to be very useful. Worth a try and they are free too.

Many thanks for the link, I hadn't come across that site!

tonyt said:
No need to rub it in

Sorry, not intended... We've often found that people missing from the indexes seem to have been miraculously added the second or third time we look. [confused]

ChrisBowyer said:
tonyt said:
No need to rub it in

Sorry, not intended... We've often found that people missing from the indexes seem to have been miraculously added the second or third time we look.

Was only joking! [grin]