Mel, Thank you for taking the time to write such a detailed response. I don't know why, but I've never followed those links (maybe assuming I knew it already - never assume!). I've just been looking at the entries for district 7b and I'm surprised at how many odd numbers there are. I agree absolutely with the work the volunteers are doing with FreeBMD - it's absolutely invaluable. I do remember the days when you had to search the "St. Catherine's House Indexes" quarter by quarter on microfilm. (In the county library 60 miles away.) I wanted to find a marriage between Joseph PROBERT and Elizabeth HARDWICK (or possibly HOLDSWORTH) probably in Derbyshire as Elizabeth came from Common Newbold. I have a bible with the dates of births of all of their 13 children recorded in it from Aug 1871 to 1896 - roughly one child every 2 years. So I thought the marriage was likely to have taken place not long before Aug 1871. I made list after list of all the PROBERT/S, HARDWICK/E/S, HO(U)LDSWORTH but couldn't find a match. I then moved on to ROBERT/S, ARDWICK, OLDSWORTH, PROBART/S, PROBAT/T, PROBATE etc etc etc. It took me months and I never found it. But when FreeBMD came along one quick phonetic search found Joseph PROVERBS and Elizabeth HARDICK in 1Q 1871. And the certificate showed these names quite clearly. The fathers and witnesses all matched family members. All had made their marks - none signed. As for Margaret HARDWICK, I don't think she married David COCKERTON! Kind regards, Rosemary Northumberland UK Email: rosemary@rprobert.co.uk Family History: http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~rprobert/ Banburyshire Website: http://www.rootsweb.com/~engcbanb/ On 18/04/2013 15:36, Mel Smith wrote: > Rosemary > > When you carry out a person search and then look at the resulting page (in > this case 1047) you get the three names. > > Several lines below the list of names FreeBMD asks "have you found the > person you are looking for or is a spouse missing". It then directs you to a > link (something like can be found here)and if you follow these links and > read the instructions you can do several searches to try and find missing > persons or errors. One of them permits you to search individual pages in a > given volume. > > In that search routine I input Chesterfield, 2nd qtr and 1881 and it gave a > list of pages and the number of names on each page. In this case I saw page > 1017 also had three people and when I looked at that page spotted a Margaret > WITHAM and then looked at that image and saw the potential for > mis-transcription due to the badly imaged 1 or 4.. > > By the way I since looked for a Margaret HARDWICK marriage to a WITHAM prior > to 1881 without success. > > I think if one name in a marriage is there then the other must be somewhere > in the index as the record did reach the GRO to be indexed. If neither name > is there then there is a possibility that the marriage record never made it > to the GRO to be indexed and you then need the local RO index or other > methods to find marriages. If you happen to have read the books about the > GRO Indexes and all the errors in them (I think the title is something like > "A Comedy of Errors) If I recall the author postulates a potential of 10% > errors in the indexes. I feel lucky that I haven't yet found an error in my > list of ancestors. And that's not quite true. I can't find my grandmother in > either the GRO or local RO indexes and I can only surmise her mother never > registered the illegitimate birth. Lots of transcription errors in FreeBMD > though because of the poor quality of some original pages and the errors > made by the original clerks transcribing the local info into the GRO index. > That's not the fault of FreeBMD or the volunteer transcribers. They are > doing a fantastic job > > Mel Smith