GRO Online Historic Indexes

[Mary from Italy]

A very interesting update from the LostCousins newsletter:

Digital copies of certificates to be trialled
From 9th November the GRO will be trialling a new service under which uncertified PDF copies of previously digitised entries in the birth and death indexes will be available at a reduced price of £6 (a paper certificate costs £9.25). The years of coverage for historic entries are as follows:

Births: 1837 to 1934
Deaths: 1837 to 1957

(It will also be possible to order copies of birth, marriage, and death entries which were originally recorded in digital format - I believe this system commenced in 2007.)

The trial will last for only 3 weeks, but may close earlier (only 45,000 PDFs will be made available at this price). My guess is that those 45,000 PDFs will be sold very, very quickly - which is why I have rushed out this special edition newsletter!

http://lostcousins.com/newsletters2/...s.htm#PDFtrial

[JBee]

Well I looked to see if my grandfather had any siblings Feb 1901 and it doesn't even give his birth. I have his certificate so know he was registered.

[kiterunner]

I have found some of mine mistranscribed, Julie; could that be the problem? If you try one of the "similar" surname options and leave out first name, but put in the name of the district, maybe he will come up. Also try "female" in case the gender was mistranscribed.

[Lindsay]

At last it looks like I might be able to find my grandmother's brothers - I was always told there were 10 of them, but to date I've only found 5. Fairly common name, plus a casual attitude to baptisms and a tendency to pass children round the family at census time and describe them as son or daughter of whoever they were staying with has made it really hard.

It looks like I've identified all of them, but I won't be able to resist getting the certs to be sure I'm right.

[JBee]

I tried similar names and without a first name and no place of birth without any luck

[Mary from Italy]

Have you found his birth on FreeBMD or Ancestry?

[JBee]

Yes Mary and I have the certificate.

[Nell]

I got excited about this - I've not done much family history this year as I've been trying to sell my house, buy another and other things too. But guess what? I went to log in and couldn't remember my password. So I asked for a new one, which arrived immediately - and it didn't work! Now waiting for another one!

[James18]

Obviously being able to order digital certificates at a reduced price is great, but could someone tell me what - aside from that - the advantage of this new GRO search is?

Am I missing something very obvious? (Quite likely) How are you finding people you hadn't yet been able to?

[Nell]

Well, finally logged on and after a to and fro of emails I have a verification code. But the site is being very slow - I can only assume all of you lot are clogging it up with your searches!

But I must have missed something - you have to put the year of the event +/- 2 years, so you need to be fairly certain when it happened (I am wanting a death that happened between 1901 and 1911).

No marriage index either so still no joy with my great-grandmother's 2nd nuptials.