26 Aug 07
Getting Started on your Family Tree - filling the gaps with the UK BMD
So hopefully, you know have a hand written tree with all the information I talked about gathering in the Basics .
More than likely, there will be many facts missing. As you go back further, less is known. Women’s maiden names are lost in the mists of time. Ranges of estimated dates get wider and wider. So how do you fill the gaps?
The easy solution is to order every single certificate relating to your family (and I will explain how to order certificates from the General Register Office in a later post), but this is also a very expensive solution. As you go back through your family tree, with each generation the number of ancestors usually doubles and at £7 a certificate and often 3 certificates per ancestor, (birth, marriage and death)…… well, do the sums.
I don’t think that Genealogy should be an expensive hobby. You have to spend money, sure, but by being selective and using many of the free resources out there, you can keep the costs down.
One of the best free, or at least cheap, resources is the UK BMD index, (often referred to as the St Catherine’s index). If your ancestors were born, married or died in England and Wales after 1837, they will feature on this index. But first I will explain what it is and what it contains.
From 1 July 1837, every birth, marriage or death in England and Wales had to be registered in the district where the event happened. Each quarter year, the registers from the districts were gathered together and sorted by Event - Year - Quarter - Name into an Index for England and Wales. A reference was then allocated to identify the certificate associated with the event. A typical entry might say;
Marriages registered in Jul, Aug, Sep1889
Surname First Name District Volume Page
Dodds Jessie Bell Liverpool 8b 303
If Jessie Bell Dodds was in your family and she married in 1889, you now have all the information that you need to order her marriage certificate from the General Register Office .
You have to note that this is the index to the certificates, you cannot view the actual certificates online.
As time went on, more information was added to this index to make it more informative.
The age at death was added to the death index from 2nd quarter 1866.
The Mother’s maiden name was added to the birth index from 3rd quarter 1911.
The spouse’s surname was added to the marriage index from 1st quarter 1912
The date of birth of the deceased was added to the death index from 1969.
You can use the index in many ways. For example, you know that your Grandfather was born in 1914, but you have no idea what his Mother’s maiden name was. If you can find the entry to his birth in the index , the Mother’s maiden name will be listed. You can then, using one of the many search engines that can search parts of the BMD, find the marriage of your Grandfather’s parents from their surnames. You may decide to order that marriage cerificate, and from that get the names and occupations of your Great Great Grandfathers.
You can use the death index to get age at death, (although it’s not always 100% accurate as the registrar relied on the informant to know the age of the deceased), and use that to get back to the year of a birth entry.
You can gather a vast amount of information without spending anything, or at the very most, pennies.
Later on, I will provide links to the many, many websites that allow you to search the BMD, for the information you require.
For more information on Civil Registration of England and Wales, or ordering a certificate online you can visit the GRO website