G'day List, Can anyone please see if they can find a marriage in Preston, not sure if church or registry office of a marriage between a WILLIAM TURNER and a SARAH BALL, year unknow but presume it was between 1900 and 1918. Sorry that is all the information I have, as not much is know about them. Cheers Nicola (Australia) _________________________________________________________________ SEEK: Now with over 50,000 dream jobs! Click here: http://ninemsn.seek.com.au?hotmail

Hi, Nicola, You are looking for the marriage of WILLIAM TURNER and SARAH BALL, between 1900 and 1918. For a marriage to be legal in England and Wales, it must be registered under civil law. This civil registration came into force in July 1837, so if this marriage took place in E&W then there will be a civil record of it. There may also be a religious record somewhere else. The local Registrar has all the civil registers from 1837. Each quarter (i.e. at the end of March, June, etc.) he has to send details of all the marriages performed in his area in that quarter to the Registrar General in London. There they are transcribed into a national register and indexed. It is the index that is fairly widely available, whilst neither the original register nor the national register is available to the public. From 1837, there are quarterly indexes arranged in a strict alphabetical name order and the information you would see is in the form - June qtr 1876 Lancaster, James, Bury 8c 632 The index simply tells the clerk where to look to get the certificate. To order the certificate from the General Register Office you will NEED these details. To be reasonably certain that you have the correct reference you need to look for the spouse in the same quarter. If that reference is the same, the reference is probably to the marriage you want. From the beginning of 1912, each marriage entry also includes the name of the spouse, so the certainty becomes considerably greater. So how do you get at these indexes. The traditional way was to find a Mormon (LDS) Family History Centre. These centres either have a film/fiche copy of the General Register Office (GRO) Index or can obtain a copy for you. You then look through the copy, quarter by quarter, until you find a match. In your case, I would be tempted to work backwards from 1918 because of the availability of spouses' names in this later period. For a few years now, a group has been transcribing the indexes and making them available free on the internet. This project is known as FreeBMD. This project is still in progress and the years of interest may not yet be available. More recently, a company has scanned all the original indexes and made these available on the internet on a pay-to-view basis. All these three methods enable you to check the national indexes. There is a younger project that is transcribing the local Registrar's indexes and providing the local Registrar's reference number. The advantage of this is that the local Registrar's indexes are much closer (less transcriptions) to the original entries, making them inherently more accurate. The downside to this site is that being fairly new the present entries on this site are mainly in the 1800s and vary from Registrar to Registrar. You will be able to find further details of all these at www.ukbmd.org.uk Once you have found the index entry you will have to send for a copy of the certificate and again details of how to obtain certificates will be available on the UKBMD site. Hope this helps Jim Lancaster (Bury, Lancs.) ----- Original Message ----- From: "Nic Apperley" <mumsfamilytree@hotmail.com> To: <ENG-LANCS-PRESTON-L@rootsweb.com> Sent: Saturday, July 10, 2004 4:34 AM Subject: Unidentified subject!