The Genealogist website is the online data service from S&N and the British Data Archive and contains a wide variety of subscription databases. With the exception of the excellent BMD index section, much of the other material available on the website is census related, and as these two sources are of paramount importance to your family history research after the mid-19th century, this is a useful service to explore.

Census and other material

The census indexes will particularly benefit users of CD census images, such as the ones published under the British Data Archive banner. There are full indexes available for the London 1891 and 1861 censuses, plus for the two per cent sample 1851 census for all of England and Wales. Herefordshire is well covered with census indexes for 1851, 1891 and 1901, with the latter year linked to the census enumerator’s book images. The intention is to extend this part of the service, with census indexes linked to original page images. They are currently working on those for the London area, which should be available shortly.

There are also complete 1891 census indexes for Lincolnshire and Wiltshire, a full transcript for the Worcestershire 1851 census, and a lot of partial census indexes, too. Another possibly useful index is that for the Merchant Navy Crew lists and agreements, for the years 1863 to 1913.

GRO indexes

One of the biggest advances in home-based genealogy has been the facility to search the General Register Office (GRO) for birth, marriage and death registrations and order copies of the certificates online. Civil registration, introduced to England and Wales on 1st July 1837, is your most important tool in researching your 20th and later 19th century ancestry, and this is the first piece of family history research that can be carried out entirely without leaving your computer keyboard.

BMDindex is an alternative GRO index service, with some innovative and money-saving features that make it an attractive option to the other pay services. As all the data wasn’t in place, we haven’t thoroughly investigated this website before, although it has been mentioned in various news items.

Of course before getting out their credit card, most people will first try the slow and incomplete FreeBMD service. However, coverage of the 19th century is still rather patchy- and almost nonexistent beyond 1901. If you can’t find the reference on FreeBMD, a £5 subscription to one of the commercial services is money well spent, as they are much faster to use than the indexes available on microfilm or fiche. Most people will spend that much getting to the local library or record office, and you can achieve much more in a couple of hours online than a couple of days trawling through filmed indexes.

Most indexes on thegenealogist.co.uk have a flat rate subscription fee of £5 for three months or £14.95 for the year, but the BMDindex subscription costs £5 for 50 credits lasting up to 3 months, and £14.95 for 200 credits lasting up to a year. Fifty credits go a long way, especially with the generous free indexing of the post 1984 results, but the maps are more expensive, costing either ten or 20 credits each.

All of the BMD indexes, commercial or free, will only help to identify the reference to an event for an individual, allowing purchase of a copy certificate. The indexes include the full name, event, year and quarter, plus a district, volume and page reference. This provides all the information necessary to order a copy certificate. You can find the mother’s maiden name with a birth entry after 1911; the surname of the spouse with marriages after 1912 and the reported age at death from 1866, which changed to the date of birth after 1966.

Finding an entry in the index shouldn’t be used as a substitute for buying a copy certificate as they contain a wealth of important additional information. However, for siblings and side lines in your tree you may consider it worth waiting until you can afford that extra certificate.

BMDindex is not just a copy of existing commercial BMD sites, the service has some features not available on rival services, which make it easier and cheaper to use and add new avenues to your research.

The Genealogist: easier and cheaper than some other BMD sites

1837-1984 entries

Like other commercial services, BMDindex uses pages of the original typed and handwritten GRO indexes linked to an index. They were the first online service to index these pages by the first and last name that they contain. It would be too costly and time consuming to fully index every page, so this is an excellent compromise. A search will not necessarily find a page with a matching entry to your search, but will find all the pages containing the range of names your query falls into. This means faster searches with fewer records to view in order to find information.

Post-1984

The GRO indexes were fully computerised by the GRO after 1984 and have their own separate search pages. The simple search requires a surname and forename (wildcards can be used after three letters). The Advanced Search page will allow you to find all surname entries for a selected period, as you can enter solely a surname if you wish. To reduce the number of hits with common surnames you can enter up to two forenames, or initials, the mother’s maiden name, the year of registration, the month of registration and the district.

Unlike 1837online, your post-1984 searches don’t just say “you have 20 matches... To view these will cost 20 units.” The BMDindex results contain virtually all the information from the full entry. This enables you to select just one of the 20 potential hits, with a reasonable degree of certainty, and pay for just one unit. The additional information your one credit buys for a birth entry is the mother’s maiden name and the page and folio numbers necessary to order a copy certificate. When searching for events after 1984, your credits will go much further on BMDindex than on other BMD sites.

Smart Search technology adds some useful features to the fully computerised records, such as automatically looking up the spouse’s entry for a selected marriage to obtain their christian name. The Children Search looks for all the children of a given couple and another search automatically locates the likely index page images containing the birth registration of an individual, based on the date of birth recorded in their death entry. Of course, this reverse look-up only works with males and spinsters.

Surname mapping

The ability to map the distribution of surname events onto a country map of England and Wales is a useful addition to the site. You can map births, marriages or deaths over a series of date ranges and produce a colour coded distribution map and table of the actual number of events.

You can also find out which counties have the heaviest concentration of a given surname. It is fascinating to see how unusual surnames, with limited distribution on the 1880 map, then spread across the country through the years as individuals become increasingly mobile.

www.TheGenealogist.co.uk

1 You can sign in to your account, or subscribe to any of the databases from the home page, at www.thegenealogist.co.uk. Once subscribed you can log onto the BMD index.

2 At the BMDindex home page you can select to search either the records before, or after, 1983, or choose to go to the Surname Mapping section.

3 Selecting the pre-1984 BMD record search opens the Basic Search Form. Select the type of event and enter the name. To cut down the number of possible results you can also add a date range before submitting the query.

4 The search results show four quarterly pages for each year in the range selected in the search. Click any of these to view the relevant page.

5 The page images are in PDF format so most people will already have the viewer installed. The first three pages didn't reveal the entry, but in the last quarter I found what I was looking for.

6 The PDF Page Viewer allows you to zoom in to read the entries more easily. Note the details accurately so you can order the certificate, and print or save the page for your own records.

7 Selecting the search for the post-1983 records provides a smiliar Basic Search screen, but you can also elect to search for birth dates from the information in death registrations, and to find birth records from family or maiden names. You will also find links to an advanced search form and the mapping facility. Enter 'Wayne Rooney' and click search.

8 The results find just one entry for Wayne Mark Rooney, registered November 1985 in Liverpool. He was born 24th October 1985, so this appears to be the correct entry. Click the View button to see the full entry.

9 In addition to the information found in the index, you will discover his mother's maiden name plus the volume and page numbers required to order a certificate.

10 You can use the Children Search screen to find his brothers, by entering his mother's maiden name and the Registration district. You could also use his father's surname, if you knew it.

11 The Advanced Search form allows you to enter just a surname, if you wish. Or you can add a variety of additional information, if necessary, to make the number of search returns more manageable.

12 You can map the distribution of surname events by county, for a variety of periods. Here you can see the mapping of Tippey for the period 1983-1992. With only four events in the period, you can see that I am something of a 'rare breed.'