Births/marriages/deaths

The General Register Office indexes provide a major source for one-name studies in England and Wales. In theory, all birth, marriage and death registrations from July 1837 are indexed. Microfilm or microfiche copies of the original index are available at libraries, record offices and Family History Centres throughout the world. The original indexes in book format are no longer available for public consultation.

Copies of the GRO index are now also found on the Internet. The FreeBMD project and Ancestry have posted a complete set of page images for the period 1837 to 1983. In addition, Ancestry mantains a copy of the core BMD data on a searchable database. Findmypast and Ancestry BMD indexes point you to the pages where your surname entries may exist. FamilyRelatives has a fully transcribed database for the period 1866-1920 which is easier to search.

The indexes for the period 1984 onwards are produced in database format and are fully searchable using the findmypast, FamilyRelatives and Ancestry websites.

The Births/Marriages/Deaths indexes for Scotland can be accessed online at ScotlandsPeople. Currently this offers births and deaths up to 2006, and marriages up to the last 75 years. It is probable that marriages within the last 75 years up to 2006 will be added in the near future. More recent births, marriages and deaths indexes can be consulted in person at Edinburgh and at several other record offices in Scotland.

The indexes available on the ScotlandsPeople site include not only the Statutory Registers for events since 1855, when civil registration was introduced into Scotland, but also the Old Parish Registers for Births and Baptisms and for Banns and Marriages, from 1553 to 1854; however, the OPRs are inevitably no more complete than their English counterparts.

For "historical" events (i.e. births before 1908, marriages before 1933, and deaths before 1958), images of the Statutory Register entries may be downloaded from ScotlandsPeople, for considerably less money than the price charged for certificates in England and Wales. Researchers may also download images of OPR entries given in the Indexes at the same level of fees.

Even without the purchase of certificates, the indexes alone can be very useful in compiling data about a name, whether in England and Wales or in Scotland.