GRO Indexes

[HarrysMum]

Do they marriages? I can only find births and deaths….and then one of the births seems to be missing.

[Phoenix]

They have yet to index marriages. This may be purely a matter of logistics: years and years and years of discussion and failed projects preceded the final indexes we have. It has always been the case that we could check potential spouses to cross reference an entry before we ordered a certificate, so they may feel that in the majority of cases we can find the correct entry without additional finding aids.

Identifying a missing birth entry is more of a problem. I have found eight entries on Freebmd, seven on the GRO site, and yet they have been unable to spot the one they did not transcribe. (I wasn't sufficiently curious to pay full whack and order the certificate!)

Any system will have errors. Have you tried picking up the entry on another search engine, and seeing how the surname is transcribed there?

[Katarzyna]

FindMyPast has transcribed many but not all of mother's maiden name to their birth indexes back to 1837

[kiterunner]

I don't think they have transcribed them, Kat, but I don't think they have explained how they get the information so I suppose it's possible. But more likely they have acquired the data from the GRO's computerised information.

[Katarzyna]

Yes, Kite, I agree but the search +/- up to 40 years is much quicker than using the +/- 2-year and the bigger plus of being able to search with name variants or with ? or * for those wrongly transcribed.