My posting on Sunday 6th November about the new General Register Office release meant that I didn't post the notice that a new version of the database had been uploaded.
This version of the database contains over 500 new people out of over 600 added since the last update in August.
The majority of the entries have been generated as a result of completing the updating to include all the entries that I have been able to identify from the 1939Register. Mind I have about 150 that I can't place and the majority of these are females that married into the Halstead name and it has not been able to correctly identify their husband due to the commonality of some of the men.
Regards
John - email: halstead@one-name.org
Tuesday, 8 November 2016
Sunday, 6 November 2016
Update on the new GRO indexes
I wrote about a month ago on the new indexes released by the General Register Office. you can find the posting here.
This update will detail my findings and also hopefully give you some pointers
The indexes cover births from 1837 to 1915 and deaths 1837 to 1957 and were created over 10 years ago as part of the ill fated DoVE project. No other new indexes were created.
However these are a gold mine as I found at least 5 entries that were not in the indexes available on FreeBMD, ancestry, findmypast or elsewhere
Births
This involved the checking of over 7,300 birth entries from 1837 to 1915 and add the extra information. the extra information was twofold with the mothers maiden name (MMN) being added for all entries and also for those years when the original indexes only added an initial for the second first name the full name. There is one annoying trait in the new indexes do with mothers' maiden name and an inconsistency in the way that it was reported. This appears to relate to those people who were illegitimate and therefore have a MMN the same as the name being searched. so will have the surname and others not - it seems almost as though it was down to the transcriber.
I have checked through the birth indexes from 1901 to 1911 and of the 1059 all but 31 have been allocated to a family. Those that have yet to be resolved are because they are either illegitimate and need the certificate to get the mothers name or they have a mothers’ maiden name where two people have married with that name in the period in question thus making it impossible to be certain who the person belongs to. whilst many of these are children that died early it does mean that families are becoming more complete.
Deaths
Again there were two changes with this new index. Firstly had full first names (no matter how many) which of course makes it easier to decide which George A is which and it also included age at death for those prior to 1866. it is this latter update which causes the greatest problem.
For the Halstead archive all of the information was extracted from the original indexes about 15 years ago into Excel and has been updates as new information becomes available as well as recording which persons in the database the entry relates to which means that in theory you can't use the same entry for two people!. now for many years many of the indexes on the local BMD projects on UKBMD have included the age at death back to 1837 and these were included in the Excel files. So it was easy to see any errors that might have crept in. It appears that many of the ages in the indexes up to the age to 2 years were incorrectly recorded. So any entry of 15 months may have been recorded as 2 or 15 - there appears to be no way of checking.
John Hanson
email - halstead@one-name.org
This update will detail my findings and also hopefully give you some pointers
The indexes cover births from 1837 to 1915 and deaths 1837 to 1957 and were created over 10 years ago as part of the ill fated DoVE project. No other new indexes were created.
However these are a gold mine as I found at least 5 entries that were not in the indexes available on FreeBMD, ancestry, findmypast or elsewhere
I have completed the
extraction of the material relating to the Halstead name and its variants
resulting in 7360 birth entries to 1912 and 2,400 changes to death records.
This has been a combination of age at death to 1865 and the remainder are where
the second Christian name is included.
Births
This involved the checking of over 7,300 birth entries from 1837 to 1915 and add the extra information. the extra information was twofold with the mothers maiden name (MMN) being added for all entries and also for those years when the original indexes only added an initial for the second first name the full name. There is one annoying trait in the new indexes do with mothers' maiden name and an inconsistency in the way that it was reported. This appears to relate to those people who were illegitimate and therefore have a MMN the same as the name being searched. so will have the surname and others not - it seems almost as though it was down to the transcriber.
I have checked through the birth indexes from 1901 to 1911 and of the 1059 all but 31 have been allocated to a family. Those that have yet to be resolved are because they are either illegitimate and need the certificate to get the mothers name or they have a mothers’ maiden name where two people have married with that name in the period in question thus making it impossible to be certain who the person belongs to. whilst many of these are children that died early it does mean that families are becoming more complete.
Deaths
Again there were two changes with this new index. Firstly had full first names (no matter how many) which of course makes it easier to decide which George A is which and it also included age at death for those prior to 1866. it is this latter update which causes the greatest problem.
For the Halstead archive all of the information was extracted from the original indexes about 15 years ago into Excel and has been updates as new information becomes available as well as recording which persons in the database the entry relates to which means that in theory you can't use the same entry for two people!. now for many years many of the indexes on the local BMD projects on UKBMD have included the age at death back to 1837 and these were included in the Excel files. So it was easy to see any errors that might have crept in. It appears that many of the ages in the indexes up to the age to 2 years were incorrectly recorded. So any entry of 15 months may have been recorded as 2 or 15 - there appears to be no way of checking.
John Hanson
email - halstead@one-name.org
New indexes to the General Register Office certificates
I heard last week via the email newsletters from UKBMD of the announcement by the General Register Office of the release of their own indexes to the Births (1837-1915) and deaths (1837-1957). If you don't already subscribe then I would recommend that you do so by registering to keep up to date with all the latest news on the Local BMD indexing projects.
You will find details if you use the GRO online ordering system.If you haven't used if then you will need to register first.
So what is special about this index?
Well it contains mothers maiden name from 1837 and the death indexes have age from 1837. with the original indexes which of course all the other sites have created their own indexes from only contain MMN from 1912 and age at death from 1866. It should help all family historians in the future.
So far I have only had the chance to check the details that I have for the first 3 years but alread it has thrown up one birth that wasn't in the other indexes and had a mothers maiden name I wasn't expecting in another. This led to the discovery that she had been married before - mind both her marriages were prior to the start of Civil Registration in 1837 and often the condition of a wife was not indicated.
Mind there does appears to be an issue with the death indexes in that ages under 12 months have occassionally been indexed as imply a number of years rather than being 0 as in the later entries. So check thoroughly any entry where the age is anything up to at least 12 against another source. maybe the birth entry if the first names are unusual, the burial index or one of the local registrar indexes.
You will find details if you use the GRO online ordering system.If you haven't used if then you will need to register first.
So what is special about this index?
Well it contains mothers maiden name from 1837 and the death indexes have age from 1837. with the original indexes which of course all the other sites have created their own indexes from only contain MMN from 1912 and age at death from 1866. It should help all family historians in the future.
So far I have only had the chance to check the details that I have for the first 3 years but alread it has thrown up one birth that wasn't in the other indexes and had a mothers maiden name I wasn't expecting in another. This led to the discovery that she had been married before - mind both her marriages were prior to the start of Civil Registration in 1837 and often the condition of a wife was not indicated.
Mind there does appears to be an issue with the death indexes in that ages under 12 months have occassionally been indexed as imply a number of years rather than being 0 as in the later entries. So check thoroughly any entry where the age is anything up to at least 12 against another source. maybe the birth entry if the first names are unusual, the burial index or one of the local registrar indexes.
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