The GROwth of the Birth, Marriage, and Death Index: An Introduction to The LancashireBMD Project

The LancashireBMD website enables the user to undertake a free search of the birth, marriage and death indexes held in the local register offices within the historic county of Lancashire. On finding the required entry it is then possible to print off an application form containing the office's local reference. Some register offices also offer an online ordering service. By providing the office with their local reference number, rather than the General Register Office (GRO) reference, will enable them to quickly locate the certificate and return it much more speedily than the ONS at Southport. 

The website was established in 2003 by John Marsden of the Manchester & Lancashire FHS and the Lancashire Family History & Heraldry Society, seeing the potential, quickly joined the project. We were then followed by other family history societies.

When I commenced my research in the mid 1970's the only way to locate a BMD certificate was to search the GRO indexes. These were originally located at Somerset House, London until they were moved to St Catherine's House in 1972. In 1997 the indexes were moved to the Family Records Centre and after several years index books were removed from public inspection. The indexes became more accessible once microform copies of them became available in local repositories.  In 1998 Freebmd (www.freebmd.org.uk) was founded with the intention of creating a free searchable database of the GRO Indexes of England and Wales. With the growth of the Internet more website commenced offering access to the GRO indexes. Many of these sites are available on a subscription bases for example www.ancestry.co.uk www.findmypast.co.uk  and www.thegenealogist.co.uk

The GRO indexes are compiled from the copied certificates supplied on a quarterly bases by the Superintendent Registrars of the 600 plus registration districts in England and Wales. Producing these copies were not without problems and there was no provision in the legislation to ensure accuracy of the copies. Even if any checks were undertaken it is unclear as to how effective it may have been. This can accounts for some of the errors in the indexes. 

There is no documentation that explains how the GRO carried out the indexing and sorting procedures in the 19th century. Nor is it generally known when various parts of the handwritten indexes were typed. The first step in indexing must have been for a clerk to copy out the names, together with the district name, volume and page numbers. These names would then have to be sorted into an alphabetical order based on the names. In the absence of effective mechanical means of sorting, it would have been logical to sort each volume separately and then merge the volumes into a total index as the final step. There would be no room in such a process for checking on an apparent error. 

The indexing procedure was a very labour intensive activity and therefore, it is little wonder that the Records Department of GRO had the largest number staff. In 1840 the Records Department accounted for 29 staff out of a total of 50 and by 1921 this had increased to 114 out of a total of 172.

From the above description it will be clear that there were at least two copying processes and this was in addition to the copying already involved in making the quarterly returns. Each time a copy was made then an error could be made. Therefore, it is little wonder there are errors in the GRO indexes

The Registration Service is fully aware of the errors in the GRO indexes and the types of errors have been highlighted by Mike Foster, who undertook a partial check at the General Register Office of a one per cent sample of the marriage material. The types of errors Mike identified were:

• Omitted quarterly returns could well be between 50,000 and 350,000 marriages based on finding from Essex and Somerset analysis.
  
• Marriages missed in the indexing could be at least 15,000
  
• Individual entries missing from the index could be around 20,000
  
• Variant/duplicate indexing could amount to 250,000 to 500,000 names.
  
• Errors in names as indexed are many and could rival the variant names.
  
• Names lost from the indexes through the typing process are certainly significant and impossible to quantify at this stage.
  
• Names lost from least the handwritten fiche and film of all three indexes are of the order of 25,000 through frames missed in their production.
  
• Errors of indexing (in volume/page numbers and district names), both in original indexing and through later typing, could range from 50,000 to 200,000.
  
• There are many other errors in great variety, witnesses indexed, fathers indexed instead of sons, brides indexed with new names.
  
• These estimates of errors may well be conservative. A million errors in the 1837/99 period are very probable.

(For more information see Michael Whitfield Foster, "A Comedy of Errors" or The Marriage Records of England and Wales 1837-1899. [Wellington, 1998] “Act 2” of this book was published in 2002).

Clearly all the sources that are based on the GRO indexes will be reproducing these errors. However, no matter how carefully the transcriptions are carried out and checking procedures are performed it will not overcome any problems between the original certificates in the local offices and copied at the GRO. 

By transcribing the local indexes and checking them against the original certificates that are held in each Register Office the LancashireBMD project is able to overcome many of the above problems. In this way it is possible to produce a more reliable index. This has enabled many users to locate entries that do not appear in the GRO Indexes.

The following are a few examples of the errors within the GRO Indexes:

•  Terry Gorman, of Scituate, Massachusetts, USA was unable to find the following  using the GRO Index on the  Ancestry website:
•  Marriage of Joseph Wilson to Margaret Shannon that took place in 1853
• Birth of William Gorman that took place in Oldham in 1856 or that of his twin brother, Thomas
• Alan Gorry was unable to locate the 1861 marriage of James Tague to Margaret Armstrong that took place in Liverpool.

All these events were identified using the LancashireBMD website.

The LancashireBMD website has other advantages over the GRO Indexes:

The GRO Indexes states the registration district in which the event was registered. Due to boundary changes these registration districts many no longer exist. For examples the Registration Districts of Burnley & Pendle, Chorley, Fleetwood & Fylde, Hyndburn & Rossendale, Lancaster, Preston & South Ribble, Ribble Valley and West Lancashire are merged on 23rd May 2005 to form the Lancashire Registration Districts. All of the registers and indexes from these offices were moved to the new office. The LancashireBMD website contains details of the offices were the certificates are currently located.

As mentioned above the GRO Indexes only give the Registration District in which the event was registered. With marriages the LancashireBMD website states the church in which the event took place. Prior to 1899 the registrar has to attend all nonconformist marriages and the website records these as civil marriages. Births and deaths were registered in the sub-district in which the event took place and therefore the website contains this information.

The website gives details of all the updates and the type of coverage. It also contains information to help anyone new to family history research. The homepage also contains links to all the participating FHS's as well as the relevant Register Offices. There is also a link to the UKBMD page (www.ukbmd.org.uk) which will enable anyone with interests outside Lancashire to locate a relevant BMD website. Also by clicking on the "Register" link on the UKBMD homepage it is possible to subscribe to the UKBMD Mailing List. In this way it is possible to be kept up-to-date with all the latest UKBMD information.

Since first developing the software from the UKBMD project Ian Hartas has improved some of the functions so it is now possible to show mother’s maiden names. When searching for births and deaths you are now able to limit the search to a specific sub-district and with marriages you can now search on a specific church. 

Clearly the LancashireBMD website, which is part of the UKBMD Project, is a valuable resource for family historians which overcomes many of the problems associated with the GRO indexes. Therefore it came as no surprise to learn that the UKBMD project was voted as the 2nd place winner behind ancestry.co.uk in the reader poll run by Family Tree Magazine in 2011. The LancashireBMD project continues to be a success, recently adding their 19th million record to the website. This fantastic achievement is made all the more impressive when considered all those who work on the project are volunteers.

Many of these volunteers are members of the Lancashire Family History and Heraldry Society, and many more members engage with the other projects and day to day missions to help family history enthusiasts and researchers find their Lancashire ancestors. The society always welcomes new members and hosts regular meetings around Lancashire and in London which are open to all. 

Website: www.lfhhs.org and www.lfhhsonline.com  
Twitter: https://twitter.com/lfhhsonline
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LFHHSOnline  

The LancashireBMD project records and resources can be found at www.lancashirebmd.org.uk.

Written by Tony Foster. Tony is the Resources and Projects Co-ordinator at Lancashire Family History and Heraldry Society.