Posted by FamilyHistoryFour on Saturday, January 19, 2019 in Hints & Tips
Typically, the starting point for our online research are vital records and census records. Census records are useful for researching places and people’s lives over time, or at a point in time. As the census is taken every ten years we get a snapshot of that family on that day. With multiple census records we start to build a picture of the family, we may see anomalies between records, such as a missing child or notice a large gaps between the birth of children. It is a sad reality that some infants died shortly after birth or at a young age so may only be in one census or may not appear in any census records at all. This tip from Phyllis will help build a more complete picture of your family and help you discover how many children your ancestor actually had.The General Register Office holds a central copy of all birth, marriage and death registrations for England and Wales from 1837. To search the birth index is easy and can be accessed via: https://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/certificates/indexes_search.asp. To use the site you do need to be registered on the site. It is free to search the indexes but you will have to pay for certificates.
The search for names can be exact spellings, phonetical or similar sounding. The names are also broken down into three parts, surname (which is a mandatory), followed by first and second forenames. When searching for children we yet do not know about leave these fields blank. As we should know the mother’s maiden name this should be added making the search easier.
The main issues with GRO website is that you must choose the gender (male or female), and a year, but you can only search for up to 2 years on either side so you will have to amend as you go along.
An example:
