General Chat

This is propbably a very silly question but here goes:

I keep sending off for certificates which turn out to be the wrong people! Is it possible to go anywhere and look through all the birth, marriage and death certificates without paying for each one?

Thanks

Sam

No. Well, mostly no. There are a few places for a few areas around the country where you can view stuff on line which will help.

Ancestry have a lot of London records on line - baptisms, marriages and burials. The marriages are the original copies of the marriage certs so that will save you a lot of money if you have London ancestors. The baptism records might help if they have addresses etc, but they don't usually give mum's maiden name so are not as useful as birth certs. They might however help narrow down to the right date/area?

NW Kent - Gravesham and the Medway Towns - have Cityark - all the parish records online. (I'm not sure if they have non-conformist records though).

And I know that there are some Lancashire records online but I don't have a clue about the website.

Also, FreeREG is always worth checking - transcribed details but again, it would help narrow down search criteria.

Hope this helps a bit ...

Jill

Thank you so much for your reply. I have tried FreeREG but the part of Hampshire I am interested in has not been transcribed yet. I live in Leeds and am desperate to prove my 2 x great grandfather!

Is it a very common name you are researching?

If you give some details on here or put a thread on Trying to find or Records board, someone would help to tr to narrow the birth down for you.

Christine

I have a very common "Gloucestershire" name in my tree "Brain" some villages in this area would have not existed if they were reliant on families with other names!!! And they used a very small name pool with a multitude of George's, Willam's & Thomas'

What I do, on FreeBMD is enter just the surname the county and two years either side of the approximate year. Then I will quickly scan all the names and if any look likely I can then edit my search and add a first/christian name. And then I reduce the year to one either side. And I must say by using this premise I find that although I do still get the odd "wrongun" but in the main they are often right.

Another thing that I do, once I have my certificates whether right or wrong is go back to FreeBMD and add a Postem, giving some basic info from the certificate ie DOB on births on marriage cross reference Bride/Groom and Date of Marriage and on Death records date of death and name of person registering death. This I hope will help others to avoid ordering certificates unnecessarily.

Thank you for your replies.
Christine - I put a thread on here some time ago but it didn't help I'm afraid.

PigletsPal - that is a very good idea about the Postem and I shall do that for all the ones I have.

Is it worth me going down to Hampshire to look at Parish registers? Would I get anything more than I can get online?

Thanks again.