There are a quarter of a billion records, 1837-2003, searchable on BMDindex for £5.
David Tippey looks at some of the site's features.

Longstanding researchers knew the birth, marriage and death (BMD) records as the St. Catherine's House Indexes and spent many hours winding microfilm or navigating microfiche to search just a couple of years. The General Register Office (GRO) indexes to birth, marriage and death (BMD) registrations are a key resource in family history research. They start with the introduction of civil registration in 1837 and are most useful in enabling us to locate family events and purchase the certificates to authenticate and move on our research.

If you already had a good idea of the event dates, you could get quite a few certificate references in a session with a film reader; but if not, you just checked film after film in the hope of finding a single entry. Online versions of the BMD indexes have been with us only recently, but they have already revolutionized our access to the GRO indexes, making it simple to find the necessary information for accurate certificate ordering.

There is now a choice of services that allows you to search- in a few hours- entries that would have taken days to find at libraries and record offices. Despite the fact that they all use the same GRO data, the online services differ slightly in how they operate and what they offer. BMDindex offers some innovative features not found elsewhere and a competitive pricing structure, making it well worth investigating.

1837-1983: indexed images by page name-range

Like 1837online, the BMDindex has complete coverage of civil registration images 1837-2003. FreeBMD also provides access to some of the civil registration records and, although the database is incomplete, you can check the website for an estimation of the records transcribed so far. For the period 1837-1983, 1837online and BMDindex provide an indexed page service. These page images are indexed by the name-range that each page contains, this means that generally you will not have to view more than four pages, one per quarter, to search for a single event within one year. This indexing only provides a link to pages that contain the name-range your search falls into, and doesn't indicate whether or not the name appears on that particular page.

Because the years 1837-1983 are not fully transcribed, there is little difference between using BMDindex and 1837online to view the GRO index pages. Both use page name-range indexing linked to the page images. The difference can be seen in the cost and particularly the life of the credits. You can buy the minimum BMDindex subscription of 50 credits for £5 (10p each) which last three months, or for £14.95 purchase 200 credits (7.5p each) which last a full year. Only one credit is deducted for every page image viewed and you can revisit any page at no charge for the full life of your subscription with BMDindex.

The results of a search in the 1837-1983 records provides a list of links to the pages (one for each quarter) that may contain an entry with that name.

Here you can see the search results for a marriage entry; the only additional information to that shown in the search results are the entry references required to order the certificate.

SmartSearch

BMDindex has come up with some interesting ways of searching the GRO's fully digital post-1983 data: their SmartSearch allows you to query the data in a variety of different ways, enabling you to extract the maximum amount of information with speed and ease.

The SmartSearch features incorporated into BMDindex allow you to perform several special searches based on the results you have already found.

• It can find the full name for a spouse, not just the surname, by automatically performing a reverse search and looking up the second marriage index entry to find the forenames.
• If you are looking at a death index entry for a male or a spinster; it can use the reported age at death to list the birth index pages likely to contain their birth entry. Of course ages on certificates are not always accurate, but the feature can save you time and mental arithmetic.
• The other SmartSearch feature allows you to find all the children in a family by looking up other birth entries registered to the same parents.

Although you could perform all these searches yourself, the SmartSearch one-click approach saves you time and effort.

The advanced search form for the post-1983 digitised data offers a number of options to increase the accuracy of your search when looking for common names.

Surname mapping

First introduced as a feature of their online two per cent 1851 Census data subscription, the surname distribution mapping tool can prove interesting and informative. One book in every 50 of the 1851 Census was transcribed to form a dataset that is now the basis of the mapping tool. Using information derived from the GRO data for events which occurred in England and Wales, you can map surname densities onto a county map of England and Wales. The name density is colour coded by range, according to the numbers present, providing a visual display of surname densities across the counties. A table is also provided which gives an accurate count for each county. There are a number of year ranges which can be selected between 1880 and 2002. The surname mapping feature is simple to use and can provide some fascinating results, but it does rather rapidly eat into your credits, as each map costs 10 credits.

The use of online BMD services, such as BMDindex, coupled with the GRO's online certificate ordering system, has meant that we can at last truly carry out one entire area of research from our home computers, speeding up the research process.

In this search for marriages, clicking on the partner's surname will invoke the SmartSearch, which will reverse the lookup to find the partner's forenames, too.

1837-1983: indexed images by page name-range

Like 1837online, the BMDindex has complete coverage of civil registration images 1837-2003. FreeBMD also provides access to some of the civil registration records and, although the database is incomplete, you can check the website for an estimation of the records transcribed so far. For the period 1837-1983, 1837online and BMDindex provide an indexed page service. These page images are indexed by the name-range that each page contains, this means that generally you will not have to view more than four pages, one per quarter, to search for a single event within one year. This indexing only provides a link to pages that contain the name-range your search falls into, and doesn't indicate whether or not the name appears on that particular page.

Because the years 1837-1983 are not fully transcribed, there is little difference between using BMDindex and 1837online to view the GRO index pages. Both use page name-range indexing linked to the page images. The difference can be seen in the cost and particularly the life of the credits. You can buy the minimum BMDindex subscription of 50 credits for £5 (10p each) which last three months, or for £14.95 purchase 200 credits (7.5p each) which last a full year. Only one credit is deducted for every page image viewed and you can revisit any page at no charge for the full life of your subscription with BMDindex.

To create a surname distribution map for BMD events, simply enter the name and select the date range. Click search to create a printable map of the results.

The coloured county map gives an overall view of the concentrations. Hover the cursor over a county to see its name. The table shows the exact number of events for each county.