Just going through the latest copy of Who Do You Think You Are magazine and I see that they have a forum where people can put up orphan certificates that need a good home. Must go and dig my out and add them to the forum!

See here for more details – http://www.bbcwhodoyouthinkyouaremagazine.com/forum/unwanted-birth-certificates-t4747.html

What a great idea this website is, I am sure we all have bought certificates and other genealogy documents only to find that they aren’t about people on our family tree. My friends and I call such people “Ancestors I once had!!”.

With this website you can put your unwanted items online and hopefully find a good home for them and of course you can check the site for anything relating to your genealogy. You never know there might be just the very clue you have been looking for waiting to be found.

http://www.certificate-exchange.co.uk/index.php

I’ve just been asked where births at sea would be registered and a Google search came up with one of the very useful National Archive Guides which is at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/gettingstarted/looking-for-person/birthbritishnationalseaabroad.htm

Find My Past website has indexed the Births At Sea registers 1854 – 1887. Searching is free, but to view the details involves payment.

http://www.findmypast.com/home.jsp

Thousands of volunteers have worked on this wonderful database of the Birth, Marriage & Death GRO Indexes. The Birth and Marriages are complete up to about 1913 and the Deaths aren’t too far behind. The database is searchable by name and time period as well as by locality.

http://www.freebmd.org.uk/

Here is a link to a list of registry offices in Bedfordshire.

 http://www.galaxy.bedfordshire.gov.uk/webingres/bedfordshire/vlib/0.yoyo/yyc_bmd_registry_offices.htm

   Lancashire is one of the counties where a group of volunteers have and still are compiling an index to the local civil registration registry office entries of births, marriages and deaths. An added bonus apart from the inclusion of any entries that may have been missed in the central GRO indexes is that birth entries have the mother’s maiden name, marriage entries have the spouses name and deaths have the age at death.

http://www.lancashirebmd.org.uk/

    FreeBMD and Ancestry.co.uk have combined their resources to bring the GRO Marriage Indexes 1837 – 2005 to the internet. The fully searchable index 1837 – 1915 is available free at  http://www.freebmd.org.uk/ and the index 1837 – 2005 is on the subscription side www.ancestry.co.uk 

The birth indexes for the same time period have been available for some time, the breakdown of who offers what and which one you have to pay for is the same as for the marriages. Both parties are working on the death indexes with a completion date of late 2009.

http://www.freebmd.org.uk/

www.ancestry.co.uk

The Register Office in the district of Bath and North East Somerset, England, holds records of local births, marriages and deaths back to the start of civil registration in 1837.

Independent volunteers, have collaborated with the local Registration Service to make the indexes to these records freely searchable via the Internet.

The database covers Bath and North East Somerset births, marriages and deaths for the years 1837 to 2007. That’s it! All further registrations of Births and Deaths are now done on line. (Marriages will continue to be added as registers are completed.)

Thanks Judy for this link

http://www.bathbmd.org.uk/index.html

The New Zealand historical Birth, Death and Marriage Indexes are now online. Which records are historical are determined by how long has elapsed since an event took place. The avialble recorsd are; births that occurred at least 100 years ago, stillbirths that occurred at least 50 years ago, marrriages and eventually Civil Unions that occurred 80 years ago & deaths that occurred at least 50 years ago or the deceased’s date of birth was at least 80 years ago.

Lots of UK based people will find this helpful as many siblings of their direct ancestors may well have emigrated.

 http://www.bdmhistoricalrecords.identityservices.govt.nz/home/

Ancestry & FreeBMD have announced that they are launching a complete searchable index of the GRO Birth Indexes 1837 – 2005. It is intended that the Marriage & Death Indexes will also become available in this searchable format in the future.

Up until the advent of the FreeBMD project you have to search 4 volumes a year, each volume being alphabetically indexed by surname, then Christian name. Then along came FreeBMd and they and their army of worldwide volunteers started to put the indexes into a computer searchable index. See http://www.freebmd.org.uk/ for the history of the project. It would appear that now the birth section of that project has been completed for the period 1837 – 1915. Ancestry have had a separate project of indexing the 1916 – 1983 period and have purchased the 1984 – 2005 section from the General Registry Office.

So you can now search online the GRO Birth Indexes 1837 – 2005 using surname, Christian name, place and time or any combination of the above. Great news for English family historians.

http://www.freebmd.org.uk/

www.ancestry.co.uk click for a free 14 day trial during which you will be able to search the above records.