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As you’re probably aware, one of the larger projects the findmypast.co.uk team has been working on this year is a complete revamp of our General Register Office (GRO) birth, marriage and death (BMD) indexes.
We’ve created a completely new, clearer set of images of the original records and we’ve also been working to transcribe each and every one of them for the very first time. This allows you to search directly for your ancestors, rather than having to browse several pages to find the person you are looking for.
Of course, some England & Wales BMD records are available elsewhere online, and some of them are even fully-indexed like our new ones, but to date, nobody else has provided a complete set of fully-indexed BMD records - another first for findmypast.co.uk, and a project which should be complete in early 2011 when we launch the death records. As always, our aim is to make your family history easier and this project is no different…
So, having launched the new birth records a few months ago, recently we’ve turned out attention to marriages.
Marriage search challenges
One of the main difficulties with searching marriages is the need to search for both spouses separately, and then compare the registration district, volume and page numbers to see if the two match up. Even worse, because more than one marriage is recorded on a single page of the GRO indexes, even if you manage to match up two potential partners, it is always possible that they actually married someone else on the same page of the index that you haven’t tracked down.
Another major challenge is finding wives when you do not know their maiden name. Often you will come across a new branch of your family in a census and identify a new husband and wife, listed under their married surname. Finding the husband in marriage records is generally possible, but without knowing the wife’s maiden name, tracking down the marriage can often be like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Introducing MarriageMatchTM
To help overcome these inherent difficulties, we’ve been developing a new search technology we call MarriageMatchTM, which should make searching for marriages much easier, and should even help you unravel some mysteries in your tree.
MarriageMatchTM does something very clever - rather than searching for one spouse in a marriage, it searches for both at the same time, and does the matching up for you. If you give the surnames of both spouses and they married after 1912, it will generally produce a list of exact matches - people with the surnames you are looking for who definitely got married to each other.
If they married before 1912, or if you only know the first name of one of the spouses, it will also show you all the potential matches on the GRO index page: in most cases you only have to choose between two (or occasionally four) people that your ancestor might have married. In any case, because it shows everybody on the same results page, you can be confident that one of the people on your results screen is the right one, and you don’t need to dig further.
Ian Tester, findmypast.co.uk's product manager
Where it really comes into its own is when you know the surname of the husband and just the first name of the wife - again, MarriageMatchTM will find you all the records where, for example, a Thomas Smith married a Catherine. You can even use a variants search on either or both of the names if you are not 100% sure of the first name the wife may have been recorded under.
We have been testing it thoroughly at findmypast towers, and it has been incredibly valuable for us - it seems to have an uncanny ability to identify the marriage you are looking for from the millions of marriage records you might have been browsing for years, hoping to get lucky. I managed to crack five long-standing brick walls in my tree (husbands with common surnames marrying wives with common first names) in 20 minutes flat and we’re hoping you’ll find it just as useful.
We’re just doing some final tweaks to it now and will make it available on site in early December.
I’d really recommend that if you have any marriages that have left you baffled, you start digging them out now so you’re ready to see if MarriageMatchTM really can solve some of those marriage mysteries…
More...
We’ve created a completely new, clearer set of images of the original records and we’ve also been working to transcribe each and every one of them for the very first time. This allows you to search directly for your ancestors, rather than having to browse several pages to find the person you are looking for.
Of course, some England & Wales BMD records are available elsewhere online, and some of them are even fully-indexed like our new ones, but to date, nobody else has provided a complete set of fully-indexed BMD records - another first for findmypast.co.uk, and a project which should be complete in early 2011 when we launch the death records. As always, our aim is to make your family history easier and this project is no different…
So, having launched the new birth records a few months ago, recently we’ve turned out attention to marriages.
Marriage search challenges
One of the main difficulties with searching marriages is the need to search for both spouses separately, and then compare the registration district, volume and page numbers to see if the two match up. Even worse, because more than one marriage is recorded on a single page of the GRO indexes, even if you manage to match up two potential partners, it is always possible that they actually married someone else on the same page of the index that you haven’t tracked down.
Another major challenge is finding wives when you do not know their maiden name. Often you will come across a new branch of your family in a census and identify a new husband and wife, listed under their married surname. Finding the husband in marriage records is generally possible, but without knowing the wife’s maiden name, tracking down the marriage can often be like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Introducing MarriageMatchTM
To help overcome these inherent difficulties, we’ve been developing a new search technology we call MarriageMatchTM, which should make searching for marriages much easier, and should even help you unravel some mysteries in your tree.
MarriageMatchTM does something very clever - rather than searching for one spouse in a marriage, it searches for both at the same time, and does the matching up for you. If you give the surnames of both spouses and they married after 1912, it will generally produce a list of exact matches - people with the surnames you are looking for who definitely got married to each other.
If they married before 1912, or if you only know the first name of one of the spouses, it will also show you all the potential matches on the GRO index page: in most cases you only have to choose between two (or occasionally four) people that your ancestor might have married. In any case, because it shows everybody on the same results page, you can be confident that one of the people on your results screen is the right one, and you don’t need to dig further.
Ian Tester, findmypast.co.uk's product managerWhere it really comes into its own is when you know the surname of the husband and just the first name of the wife - again, MarriageMatchTM will find you all the records where, for example, a Thomas Smith married a Catherine. You can even use a variants search on either or both of the names if you are not 100% sure of the first name the wife may have been recorded under.
We have been testing it thoroughly at findmypast towers, and it has been incredibly valuable for us - it seems to have an uncanny ability to identify the marriage you are looking for from the millions of marriage records you might have been browsing for years, hoping to get lucky. I managed to crack five long-standing brick walls in my tree (husbands with common surnames marrying wives with common first names) in 20 minutes flat and we’re hoping you’ll find it just as useful.
We’re just doing some final tweaks to it now and will make it available on site in early December.
I’d really recommend that if you have any marriages that have left you baffled, you start digging them out now so you’re ready to see if MarriageMatchTM really can solve some of those marriage mysteries…
More...