The Lemon Fool

Thanks Xfool for the time you have taken to explain the wonders and mysteries of freebmd

Findmypast was enjoyable to use
went back 8 generations and put names to the many old photos that we have of family members
I gave access to a few cousins who knew more about thier side of the family than I did
and no-one had a problem using it

pje16 wrote:Findmypast was enjoyable to use
went back 8 generations and put names to the many old photos that we have of family members

Might indeed be an alternate option for the OP. But we don't know exactly what they want to do.

pje16 wrote:What happened to Jan

Yes I tried Mar to the Dec (the following year)
It doesn't like me

edit Ok the help says MAR contains Jan Feb and Mar
that's intuitive...

If you read a little background on the nature of the indexes you are searching it will become much clearer. For example all England and Wales [EDIT: was UK] vital records indexes are grouped into three month intervals; all death indexes bear either a date of birth or an age of the deceased.

The BMD search engine is excellent (legitimate problems with BMD site are incomplete records and transcription errors). To call it useless says more about the author of that particular comment than the service itself...

GS
[EDIT: RTFM comes to mind. In particular note that BMD in general does an exact match on all fields by default (an AND search). This is not a problem because it has powerful wildcard support.]

GoSeigen wrote:

pje16 wrote:What happened to Jan

Yes I tried Mar to the Dec (the following year)
It doesn't like me

edit Ok the help says MAR contains Jan Feb and Mar
that's intuitive...

If you read a little background on the nature of the indexes you are searching it will become much clearer. For example all UK vital records indexes are grouped into three month intervals; all death indexes bear either a date of birth or an age of the deceased.

The BMD search engine is excellent (legitimate problems with BMD site are incomplete records and transcription errors). To call it useless says more about the author of that particular comment than the service itself...

GS

Please do not use UK when referring to all of this. Primarily you are discussing a useful tool for records of England and Wales, not Scotland or N Ireland.

Dod

XFool wrote:

Dod101 wrote:And in Scotland you can get full digital images of the certificates for payment of a small fee for births from 1 January 1855 up until 31 December 1921. For births after then (I think it is up until then anyway) you need to pay for the full certificate if you want the details but you can actually see some details via the indexes, also available online.

I thought you were going to say my: "Strange but true, in the UK." ought to be "Strange but true, in England & Wales."
But seemingly not.

It is also true you can get a cheaper (I think £7.50) PDF copy of a certificate by email, rather than an official certificate, from the UK General Register Office for any record you can provide them with the correct GRO Index - obtained via FreeBMD, usually.

Just a small correction. The PDF copy currently costs £7, and you are notified by email but it is viewed in your online GRO account.