MarriageMatch 1837-2005

[tobyaw]

Today Findmypast released a fully searchable index of marriages in England and Wales between 1837 and 2005. This is the first time a search can be made across the full year range, searching for the bride's and bridegroom's names together.

http://blog.findmypast.co.uk/2010/11/fully-name-searchable-marriage-records-1837-2005-on-findmypastcouk/

I've spent time over the past couple of months working on preparing the data for this. Good to see it launched. Family history researchers will find this very useful.

Comments

[vivdunstan.livejournal.com]

Just off to try it now. I doubt I'll find my great-grandparents though. Either they were indexed wrongly in the central GRO records (happened in a very large number of cases), or didn't actually marry! Oh or married in Ireland (bride from Dublin), but I'm doubtful about that, given the bride probably emigrated pre-wedding.

But this will be very useful for my Cavers one-name study. Off to reactivate my Find My Past account. Thanks.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

An awful lot of people in my mother's family tree suffer from incorrect spelling by officials, which makes them a PITA to find. Surname Chinnery: Chinery, Chenery, Chennery, Chinry... and my grandmother's birth certificate has her recorded as Chimery. We thought she'd been indexed wrongly but it turned out she was indexed correctly, but under the wrong name. Sigh.

Off to play with this for the next few hours anyway! :D

[ggreig]

A Soundex "sounds like" search option should turn up name variations like that; or a more recent algorithm that eliminates some of Soundex's issues - I know they exist because I looked them up at one point, but Soundex is the memorable name.

If there isn't such an option on the site, tobyaw can suggest adding it! ;-)

[vivdunstan.livejournal.com]

It's not just variant spelling that's the problem. An awful lot of English BMD index entries simply did not get into the final central GRO indexes at all, for various reasons. A book has been written on the subject, "A Comedy of Errors" by Mike Foster, focusing on the marriage records, and highlighting just how incomplete the central index records are. It's why local projects by local registrars to index their own records online are increasingly important. Often you can trace certificates locally that cannot be traced at all in the GRO indexes.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

FMP will show up the first two or three of those variant spellings happily (and Chinner, which I'd not seen before), but I'm not sure how far beyond that it goes.