A really cool feature at FreeBMD
- From: Ron Bass writ backwards <ten.tta@xxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2007 06:01:18 GMT
Since I've recently been on a rant about the way in which FreeBMD
handled certain queries, I want to compliment their code wizards on
the solution that they found to my particular problem, and explain how
I use the site to search parish marriage records.
As a concrete example, I was interested in marriage(s) of Alfred
Britten in the Strood district. Searching FreeBMD for Alfred
Britten's marriage in Strood tells me that it occurred in Sep 1910 and
is on page 1409 of volume 2a Clicking on the page number opens a new
results page that shows a candidate for his bride as Minnie A A Eve.
To find out more about the marriage, I either had to order a
certificate, or find it in the online set of parish register scans.
The Strood registration district includes some 19 distinct CofE
parishes. Scanned images of all of the parish registers are available
online at <http://cityark.medway.gov.uk/>. I could just work my way
through all the scanned images, hoping that he wasn't married in a
non=conformist chapel or a register office. But FreeBMD gives me a
better way.
Rather than go through every parish register, I start by ensuring that
the marriage was in an Established Church. Since I know from Michael
Foster's books <http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/mikefost/>, that the
churches are ordered alphabetically at the start of the district
register, I first checked the very last parish in the district. As it
turns out, there was one marriage in Upnor in Q3 1910, the groom was
Herbert Frank Patrick. So I used FreeBMD to search for him,
restricting the search to the correct quarter, year and volume. I
don't restrict by registration district, because a few parishes
migrated from RD to RD in succeeding quarters, and I want to know when
that happens.
And this is where the wizards have added new functionality to return
my simple process. Remember that at this point, we have two results
pages open, one showing the results of a search for marriage of Alfred
Britten in Strood, and the second the one that shows all results for
the page that Alfred's wedding is recorded on. You'll notice that the
page numbers on this second sheet are active links. The magic is what
happens when you click on one of those page number links. You find
yourself at a Query page with the date , volume and page fields filled
out such that it would have generated the results page you've just
come from. This is just the "Old" behavior of the Refine Query button
that I was so upset at losing. So from that query page, I erased the
page constraint and added the new groom's name. Press query, and
fairly quickly I found that his marriage was on register page 1449. So
Alfred Britten's marriage is earlier in the GRO register, and
consequently was at an Established Church. I then performed a binary
search through the parishes, using the revise query button at each
stage to check if a bride or groom in the parish register that I was
looking at was indexed before or after Alfred's marriage. It didn't
take long to find the marriage in Higham St. Mary's.
Even in districts like Dartford, where only some of the parish
registers are available online, this search capability still allows
one to find marriages that are in the online register scans, and
identify what parish records one might need to order from the LDS when
the marriage occurs in a gap between published records.
Congratulation guys.
-Ron .
.
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