Genealogy Chat

Top tip - using the Genes Reunited community

Welcome to the Genes Reunited community boards!

  • The Genes Reunited community is made up of millions of people with similar interests. Discover your family history and make life long friends along the way.
  • You will find a close knit but welcoming group of keen genealogists all prepared to offer advice and help to new members.
  • And it's not all serious business. The boards are often a place to relax and be entertained by all kinds of subjects.
  • The Genes community will go out of their way to help you, so don’t be shy about asking for help.

Quick Search

Single word search

Icons

  • New posts
  • No new posts
  • Thread closed
  • Stickied, new posts
  • Stickied, no new posts

Introducing myself

ProfilePosted byOptionsPost Date

mgnv

mgnv Report 12 Oct 2018 10:17


FS is much improved. Here's the link to their UK collections
https://www.familysearch.org/search/collection/list?fcs=region%3AUNITED_KINGDOM_IRELAND&ec=region%3AUNITED_KINGDOM_IRELAND
and this is the restriction to English collections
https://www.familysearch.org/search/collection/list?fcs=placeId%3A1986340&ec=region%3AUNITED_KINGDOM_IRELAND%2CplaceId%3A1986340

These contain the GRO BMD index for 1837-2007-ish and the English/Welsh census (their Scottish census is not very useful)
NB the census uses the FMP transcription



Using another random name

https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:VNNK-XTX
England, Norfolk, Parish Registers (County Record Office), 1510-1997

Name: George Thomas Bartlett
Event Type: Marriage
Event Date: 02 Jan 1891, 02 Jan 1891, 02 Jan 1891
Event Place: Yarmouth St Nicholas, Norfolk, England
Gender: Male
Father's Name: George Thomas Bartlett
Marital Status: Single
Residence Place: Cobholm
Spouse's Name: Anna Edith Maria Breeze
Spouse's Marital Status: Single
Spouse's Residence Place: Cobholm
Spouse's Father's Name: Samuel Breeze

Record Collection:
England, Norfolk, Parish Registers (County Record Office), 1510-1997
Document Information:
GS Film number 1526459
Digital Folder Number 004033327
Image Number 00742


https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HT-DBYV-QY?i=87&cc=1416598
This image is from Norfolk and Norwich Record Office (Norwich, England)

https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/5061727
TG5208 : Great Yarmouth Minster: late July 2016
Subject Location TG 5243 0802 [10m precision]




England, Norfolk, Parish Registers (County Record Office), 1510-1997 188,222 Apr 27, 2018

View Images in this Collection
Browse through 301,305 images

[So transcriptions yield 188222 records, but there are 301305 images, so many records have not been transcribed.
It's worth checking:
England, Norfolk Archdeacon's Transcripts, 1600-1812 Browse Images Jan 18, 2011
England, Norfolk Bishop's Transcripts, 1685-1941 1,161,877 Oct 21, 2013
BTs and ATs are the church's own backup records - they should be identical the the church's parish rego, but aren't always]


mgnv

mgnv Report 12 Oct 2018 10:16


If you've been away from genealogy for a while, there's been some recent changes.
I imagine you used to look up BMDs at FreeBMD:

https://www.freebmd.org.uk/cgi/search.pl

FreeBMD aims to transcibe the printed GRO index which covered 1837q3 thru 1983q4 - after which they went computerized.
There were 586 quarters of each sort printed, so 1758 quarters in total. All but 30 are essentially completely transcribed/
The older incomplete quarters are:
Births Dec 1964 (31%) ****************
Births Sep 1978 (92%) ***
Births Dec 1978 (6%) ****************
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Marriages Mar 1964 (56%) ****************
Marriages Dec 1965 (26%) ****************
Marriages Dec 1966 (95%) **
Marriages Sep 1969 (51%) ****************
Marriages Dec 1969 (2%) ****************
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Deaths Mar 1975 (99%) *
The remaining 21 incomplete quarters are from the 1980s.

Here's an example of 4 random hits from FreeBMD:

Marriages Jun 1846 (>99%)
Bull Ruth Bradford Wilts 8 451
Cantello William Bradford Av. 8 451
Gay Jane Bradford upon Avon 8 451
Mortimer William Bradford Wilts 8 451
WEBB Hannah Bradford W 8 451
Webb William Bradford Wilts 8 451

Births Sep 1846 (>99%)
Cantello William Bradford W. 8 271

Deaths Sep 1846 (>99%)
Cantello William Bradford W 8 163

Deaths Jun 1937 (>99%)
Cantello Violet D 41 Camberwell 1d 691


There are some obvious shortcomings with this index. The major ones are pre-1912, there's no indication of who wed whom amongst the 6 names on the page (most had 8 names per page thru 1851).
There's no indication of the mum's maiden surname on births pre-1911q3, and there's no age at death pre-1866.
Also full names are not given, This is especially true 1911-1969q1.

The new CRO index corrects some of these deficiencies.
It covers births thru 1917 and deaths thru 1957,
The access point is the same gateway one uses for buying certified copies of the GRO copies of the records held by the local rego offices.
So one has to rego (it's free) to buy certs from the GRO and one uses the same rego to access the new index, which also allows one to purchase uncertified images of the GRO entry at a cheaper price.
This images can't be used for legal purposes, like getting a passport, but they are the same images that are placed on BMD certs.

As an aside, the images could easily incorporate a checksum that (very nearly always) guarantees they have not been tampered with.
I wrote a paper with the woman who designed a system for putting a checksum on NSW red-light traffic cam photos.
One didn't want the defence lawyer claiming the cops had altered the licence plate image on the photo. so a checksum was added to the image, and the checksum was itself part of the checksum.
So even if one altered the image and got a new checksum, finding the checksum of the image with the checksum is very very hard without the key.
However, it's easy to check the image with its imprinted checksum produces the desired imprinted checksum.



https://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/

Name: Mother's Maiden Surname: Order:
CANTELLO, WILLIAM BULL Order
GRO Reference: 1846 S Quarter in THE BRADFORD UNION Volume 08
[The page number is erroneoudly omitted - GRO has been notified]

Name: Age at Death (in years): Order:
CANTELLO, WILLIAM 0 Order
GRO Reference: 1846 S Quarter in THE BRADFORD UNION Volume 08 Page 163

CANTELLO, VIOLET DAGMAR 41 Order
GRO Reference: 1937 J Quarter in CAMBERWELL Volume 01D Page 691


The new index is a pain to search. It's hard to recover from GRO mistransciptions.
One has to search in 5 year chunks (with +/-2y) amd search twice - once for each sex.
Also, one can't specify a county directly - one can specify vol=8 thru 1851, and vol=5a for 1852-mid 20th cent gets Wilts (I think - not my part of country).


As well as the GRO, one can buy BMD certs from the local office that now holds the regos, as well as m.certs from the appropriate church if it's in their current rego.

Some local offices have their indexes online - see:


https://www.ukbmd.org.uk/local_bmd
In particular:
http://www.wiltshirebmd.org.uk/
http://www.bathbmd.org.uk/

Wiltshire Marriage indexes for the years: 1846
Surname Forename(s) Surname Forename(s) Church / Register Office Registers At Reference
CANTELLO William BULL Ruth Broughton Gifford St. Mary's History Centre C5/1/58

Wiltshire Birth indexes for the years: 1846
Surname Forename(s) Mother's Maiden Name Sub-District Registers At Reference
CANTELLO William BULL Bradford on Avon South Eastern History Centre BOASE/4/31

Wiltshire Death indexes for the years: 1846
Surname Forename(s) Age Sub-District Registers At Reference
CANTELLO William 0 Bradford on Avon South Eastern History Centre BOASE/3/231

Here, they decode the church code C5 and the subdistrict code BOASE for you - they don't always.
Here's a hit from North Tyneside:

SMITH, Thomas
Year of Birth: 1837
Register Book, Entry Number: NS1, 96

One is left to guess NS is North Shields - subdistricts are not that hard but churchs are often impossible to guess.
The 2nd element in the local ref is a register sequence number. so the birth is in the 4th BOASE birth rego.
The last element is either an entry # or a page #. Local B & D regos have 500 entries at 5 per page, and M regos usually have 500 entries at 2 per page.
Some registrars' regos have 100 or 200 entries. marr refs nearly always use an entry #, so one knows who wed whom.

Until 1898, only the established church (C of E/C of W), jews and quakers (plus the registrars) were authorized to keep official marr regos.
Non-conformist church marrs needed a registrar to attend with an official marr rego for the couple and witnesses to sign to complete the ceremony.
The asst registrars who attended these marrs often had a rego with room for fewer entries.
From 1898 on, non-conformist could apply to be authorized to keep official marr regos (Rcs chose not to apply until 1980-ish.
Each quarter, a church would send a copy of its marrs that quarter to the local RD. The local RD made an identical copy of the church rego and after this was checked a copy of the quarters marrs was sent to the GRO.
Similarly, each subdistrict registrar made a copy of that quarter's Bs & Ds and, after checking, thesewere sent to the GRO, as were the marrs in that RD.
When a B or D rego was full, it was lodged with the RD. When a church rego was full, it was turned over to the local RD, and after checking it was deposited in some archive, usually the county records office.

sharv

sharv Report 8 Oct 2018 17:43

Thanks for the welcome and advice. I'm getting up to 60 name matches on some of my people, that's a lot of contacts to work through. Of the 4 messages I have sent so far only one has replied. Unfortunately, they knew nothing about the person as they'd just copied their info from a tree on ancestry.

Looking through the forum I read a long thread about how some people just like to collect names. They might find a name match & just add it to their tree with no concern of whether it belongs or not. People like that really annoy me as 99% of my people are backed up with records of their birth, baptism, marriage etc. The other 1% I leave on my tree in the off chance that any new records that appear will let me know if they're my people or not.

As for any tree matches, I do plan to keep checking or messaging.

Sally

+++DetEcTive+++

+++DetEcTive+++ Report 8 Oct 2018 10:32

Welcome to the boards, Shiva.
With your experience, it sounds as if you’ve found many interesting snippets.

As Shirley says, the best way to find connections on this site is either via the search all members trees or use the purple star matches on your tree. Click on those & they’ll open in the original tab.

If any are for tree matches, send a message to the owner. You can check at any time to see if they’ve been accessed by looking in your sent messages box. Unread ones have an envelope icon next to the title.

Unfortunately, since it’s heyday, many previous members have abandoned their trees either through illness, loss of interest or death. GR never removes lapsed accounts. Nevertheless, you may strike lucky, particularly if the linked email address is still in use.

Shirley~I,m getting the hang of it

Shirley~I,m getting the hang of it Report 8 Oct 2018 04:35

The best way to try and find contacts is to look in members trees .which is under the help heading above the boards ,to see if anyone has the names you are interested in .

You can then try and make contact by sending a message through the find out more box

sharv

sharv Report 8 Oct 2018 01:29

Hi, I'm back on GR after a long break & thought I'd pop in to say hello. It's been over 12 years since I began researching my family tree & I found it to be a fascinating hobby. I started by having chats with my 80+ year old mum & my tree just grew & grew. Apart from GR, I buy a months sub to ancestry every so often & use most of the free sites that are about.

The majority of my ancestors are normal working class folk leading quite ordinary lives, but I love it when I come across a unexpected piece of info. An illegitimate birth, a suicide, workhouse & lunatic asylum inmates & WW2 civilian casualties have all popped up along the way.

Recently I been looking into ancestors who served during WW1 & so far have a long list of names. Sometimes the info I find is unsettling reading but I think it's important not to forget these people. The British Army Service Records available on ancestry are invaluable as they contain a huge amount of info. it's just a shame that I can't find my grandads service records.

Sorry to ramble on, I just thought you might like to know a bit about me. I've uploaded my tree & would love to hear from anyone who's researching the names of Bartlett from Norfolk, Cantello from Wiltshire & Bath, Taylor, Welsh or Duran from Camberwell in London. These are just a few, I have many more.

Sally