England and Wales birth registrations - findmypast
 

I'm not sure if this has been mentioned before, but FMP is now showing mother's maiden name for pre-1911 registrations, even though their search screen says it can only be used for entries after 1911.

It's a great improvement on searching the GRO in 5 year blocks!

Is it on all of them now, Lindsay, or just some? And do you know how they got the MMNs?

Wow, there do seem to be a lot of them now. We have discussed it before but it was only a small percentage of records. I would love to know how they have done it.

To my mind, the most important benefit of this over the GRO site is that you don't have to specify the main surname on FMP - you can leave that blank and search by MMN only. I don't know why the GRO couldn't allow that too.

Edit - and I haven't got a sub to check this, but does anyone know whether it has the MMN for illegitimate births (pre-1911) or are they blank like on the GRO site?

I picked an illegitimate birth from my tree where I have the cert, so I could be sure of the illegitimacy and not a mistake by the GRO! Here's the GRO entry:

RENYARD, FREDERICK GEORGE
-
GRO Reference: 1856 M Quarter in NEW FOREST Volume 02B Page 543

and here's FMP's entry:

First name(s) FREDERICK GEORGE
Last name RENYARD
Birth year 1856
Birth quarter 1
Registration month -
Mother's maiden name -

So, no mmn on FMP either, but I needed to check that they had done this year and Q etc as I looked at a couple of legitimate births where I know the GRO has made a transcription error in the mmn, to see if FMP had the same error, but in those cases the mmn was not yet showing on FMP (they were earlier than 1856 though).

Typically, there was no legitimate birth for a Renyard in Q1 of 1856 to check FMP have that Q covered, but I did check this birth from a similar part of the alphabet:

REYNARD, MARGARET
BARBER
GRO Reference: 1856 M Quarter in PATELEY BRIDGE Volume 09A Page 60

First name(s) MARGARET
Last name REYNARD
Birth year 1856
Birth quarter 1
Registration month -
Mother's maiden name Barber
District Pateley Bridge

...so it looks as if FMP do have 1856 covered! (the births I looked at that were not showing mmn for legitimate births on FMP were from 1838 and 1843)

I had completely forgotten about FMP adding the mmn, but do they record coverage anywhere?

Not that I've found.

My grandmother and her 9 siblings are all listed with mmn 1880-1900.

I also checked random legitimate births in the 1830s/1840s and they all display mmn, so it looks like most years are covered.

Thanks for the info, Merry and Lindsay. It's a shame they don't show MMN for illegitimate births either. I suppose they must be getting the data from the GRO's database.

The GRO has a few years after 1910 (to 1917?) where full middle names are included. I haven't seen any of that on FMP.

As for mmn, I suppose we can surmise that FMP have most years covered, but probably not all!

I'm now wondering if FMP have indeed got 'full' coverage of mmn? I did some searches wth mmn Smith starting in 1837.

1837 had under 2000 matches and 1838 5000. The difference would be expected as 1837 is only 6 months. I then checked each year through to 1850 and there was just a very steady rise year on year. I then got bored with that and checked one year in 10 (1860, 70 etc) through to 1910 and for each of those years there was still just a steady increase in the number of results.

I wonder if the two births I checked where I know the mmn is difficult to read and are on the GRO site as …..ton and …...le show up on FMP with no mmn not because fmp haven't covered those records yet, but because their system deletes partial names.

Could be.

I've just checked. My grandmother was one of 9, and the GRO has the mmn correct in all cases, whereas FMP only has it in 7 cases; in the other two cases (one born 1881 and one 1888) the mmn is blank.