Genealogy Chat

You can still 'trawl' the books from the comfort of your home!

Just get anyone with the right surname, go to 'view image' and the page is there. You can do it quarter by quarter.

if your mums siblings were born after 1911 then you can search on both FreeBMD and Ancestry using just the surnames, if you locate your mum then you can establish the area

Actually searching online is much qucker than lugging those BIG ledgers off and on the shelves and turning around to find someone had taken the place you were standing at and using your pencil and pad you had there! did happen to me at FRO several times

Karen

I think some of the larger Cities have copies of the GRO register in their Central Library. I am pretty certain Manchester does.

Mother's maiden names are only shown on the index after 1911 - if your mother's sibling was born after that, you should be able to search for the birth on freebmd or Ancestry.

It is still possible to search the images by name on Ancestry but it is a bit longwinded.

Thank you everyone. How disappointing though!

I used them last time to trawl through looking for my grand parents marriage and I was planning on going through them to see if I could find a birth of my mums sibling for which we have no date or name. The usefulness of those books was that I could pick each quarter and go to the surname and see the parents.

I think the online indexes wont help as I need to see the mother. Hope Kew microfiche soon.

I was on the Kew wesbite to see what they hold, was thinking of going in a couple of weeks, but everything I was interested in was 'not held at Kew'!

Karen

Karen - I, too, went to Somerset House (in the 1960s), but what you could see there wasn't the registers but the GRO index. There was one vol per quarter (each for Bs, Ms & Ds). They clearly weren't the registers themselves as we know these ran to a couple of dozen volumes per quarter. There are several copies of these indices scattered around - one copy is viewable online at FreeBMD - use the view images link on their homepage - it's a rather klunky interface though. There are only 2-3 copies of the actual registers - one is with the GRO in Southport, the original B-, D- and sometimes M-register is with the local rego office, but some parts of original M-regos are with the church, or if they're non-current, deposited in some archive - usually the county records office. In these church cases, the local M-rego is a copy of these parts.

Records of births, marriages and deaths in England and Wales are kept in various places, but not usually available to view at The National Archives.


See here for more info:-

http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Governmentcitizensandrights/Registeringlifeevents/Familyhistoryandresearch/DG_175464

They are at Kew but not available to look at, they intend to microfiche them at some time.
You can look on FreeBMD or ask for a look up is its later than the transcribed records they have to date.
These were the big ledgers with the GRO refs listed by the qtr for each year ,and they were sent there when the Family Records Office at Islington was closed about 2/3 years ago

Hi Karen,

no for some reason only known to the Government, these books were mothballed somewhere and are not available to look at. BMD or other computers sites are the best.

Lesley

The Key Archives are lists of what records they hold.

Years ago I went to Somerset House and was able to look through the registers of BMD, these were orginal books one for each quarter. Are these now at Kew and if so can we still look at them?

Thanks

Karen