| Notes |
- Since the original birth, marriage and death registers are not open to the public, getting access to the information on one of these certificates is done by first searching the national birth, marriage and death indexes, that have been created by the GRO for this purpose. The indexes for the three events are each divided into quarterly volumes, with the names for each quarter listed alphabetically. Once an entry in one of the indexes is found, you are then able to use that information to order of certified copy of a death, marriage or birth certificate from the GRO/ONS. The other information that can be obtained from the index include: year, record type, quarter (referred to by the last month of the quarter: March, June, September, and December), district (each county in England and Wales was divided up into registration districts), volume, and page number. Note: names were entered into the volume of the quarter in which notification of the event was received, not necessarily the quarter in which the event actually occurred.
The massive task of digitizing and, making searchable, the names contained in the GRO indexes has been underway for a few years now. This database is made available to Ancestry users, courtesy of the volunteers of the FreeBMD organization. The leadership of FreeBMD have organized the permissions and tools necessary to enable hundreds of volunteers to convert to electronic text, and publish online, searchable indexes to the civil registrations in England and Wales. More than 62 million names have already been indexed by FreeBMD, between the years of 1837 and 1983, and more names continue to be added everyday. Ancestry will add to this database as more names are provided by FreeBMD. It is estimated that more than 50% of the names between 1837 and 1983 have been indexed. Because of the nature of the index you will note that not all of the fields have been indexed all of the time. Until 1866, most of the indexes were handwritten, making the task of conversion sometimes difficult.
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English
