Need More Info Help?

[Pam Downes]

Yes, check your local library for free access to Ancestry and/or FMP .
If your ancestors married in a CofE ceremony their marriage may be in a parish register which is online and therefore save a fortune in marriage certificates, so well worth the cost of a month's subscription.

Birth and death certificates are not online, but you can often fill in details if an ancestor's siblings baptisms and burials can be found in parish registers.

Any subscription site should allow you to search for free, though they may ask you to register before using their site. So you can always search at home before going to the library. FMP and Ancestry both have the census, 1939 Register, GRO Index, but usually differ on which county records they hold.
They both also allow a 14-day free trial, though make sure you untick the 'auto-renew' box to save your bank account being debited at the end of the trial.

Lancashire have an excellent Online Parish Clerk site, though as you can imagine with places such as Manchester and Liverpool to cover as well as the other mill towns, coverage is not yet complete. https://www.lan-opc.org.uk

FamilySearch is another site which has some parish registers online for free.
FreeREG has transcriptions of parish registers. Like its siblings, FreeBMD and FreeCEN, it's a work in progress.
Check out the 'stickies' at the top of the county forums on BG because they often have lots of tips for finding information in that county.
As does Genuki. https://www.genuki.org.uk
For county-wide stuff, check out the 'Useful information & tips' and 'Useful online sources' in the BG Family History sub-forum.

Pam

[Pam Downes]

OK, so I have a death recording of my Great Grandma now, which gives her dob, but when I look for the birth certificate, there are 7 given on Free BMD's, with no specific dob, just the quarter they have been registered. I know where she lived/died, just not sure where she originally came from.

Yep, the nearest you get to a birth registration online is the quarter in which the birth was registered. This is not necessarily the same quarter as the one in which someone was born. (If you think about it logically, if someone was born at 5.30pm on 31 March it would be physically impossible to register the birth in the March quarter.) You have forty-two days in which to register a birth so if there were ten children born on 1 December, you might find that eight of them were registered in the December quarter but two weren't registered until say, the 10 January, in the following year. Those born after approximately 20 February, May, August, or November are the ones whose birth registration could be in the following quarter.

Not knowing where someone was born is why it's important that you work your way back logically and obtain at least birth and marriage certificates for your direct ancestors. e.g. your mother's birth certificate will tell you her parents' names; their marriage certificate will tell you their ages when they married, so then you can look for their births, etc, etc. Not always easy, but often by the time you're back to great-grandparents you've got the 1911 census to look at to hopefully give you clues.

This is where FreeBMD proves (in my opinion) to be the best search engine in the world. You can search so many parts of it a section at a time, but say you're searching for the birth registration of Zebeedee Smith and you get ten results for the same quarter or year. If you click on the registration district you get a link which eventually takes you to a list of all the places in ghat district. Note - a registration district may be named after the main town in it, but someone born in say Spalding registration district could have been born in any of the places in the district not necessarily in Spalding town. Which is why I always type 'registration district' when that's what I'm referring to.

Will my Grandfathers birth certificate give me any clues as to which is the correct birth certificate for her?

Not one little itty bit of a clue.

Hi Megan. Yes that’s right. I am originally from Lancashire, as are some of my ancestors. I’ve just made an account today on the GRO website and managed to track down the birth certificates for both my maternal Grandfather and my maternal Great Grandma. Just wondering how far I can get before I need to join an online service. I have also found records for all my Grandfathers siblings, so I suppose as there is only a Census every10 years, would you send for all the birth certificates, to see where they lived in between the Census’s?. Also is the 1911 Census free to view or not?

It's only necessary to send for all the sibling birth certificates if you're vitally interested in knowing exact addresses or the occupation of the father at the time of each event. I knew the address where my mum's siblings were born but I wanted to know my grandfather's occupations so I sent for all of them. Nowadays, I'd check parish registers to see if there was any information there, for starters. PRs are what I use for siblings of great-grandparents, and those further back otherwise it can become extremely expensive!

And no, the 1911 census is not view to view. Free to search the index, pay to view transcriptions and images. Ditto for all censuses except the 1881 for which you can see the transcriptions for free. As Megan has already said, there is FreeCEN, but it is still a work in progress and doesn't include any of the 1901 or 1911 census.

Pam

[Lesley Robertson]

Message 8: Jen, I can't see how the Rational Registers of Scotland will be any use to someone looking for English registers. Even if Scottish Records were being sought, these days, people are better off going to the Scotlands People Centre which is set up for genealogy research - see HERE.