ernb wrote: > Stephen BULL m Eve MASON abt. 1850 > Ernest COOK m Harriett ROBBINS between 1894 and 1915 > > There is no mention of the events in the indexes and they have been searched thoroughly by others as well as by me. They may have lived in sin all those years, but have they just not been indexed? > > In the June 2001 issue of F T M there is an article 'A Comedy of Errors, Act 2' which would appear to explain why. Extensive research by Michael Foster of NZ highlights the problems with the registration system. I quote, "Both the records and their indexes are incomplete and far from accurate." As many as one in 40 c19th marriages are 'missing'. He shows instances where whole pages of events have been omitted from the indexes. > > I am wondering if the Free BMD project could not go someway to correcting the records. Am I not right in believing that, over time, there should be an index entry for every page/record in the registers? If the index database is checked when each quarter's indexes have been transcribed, cannot all the missing entries be identified? > > The GRO could then be asked where are, say, Amesbury Births, Vol 5a, entries 243 to 247, etc. > > Or have I misunderstood the way the registers and the Free BMD indexes work? No, you understand it perfectly! Once transcription for a quarter is complete it will be possible to identify many (but not all) references which are; 1) incorrect 2) missing At present, we have no way of filling in the blanks from the GRO, but there are other avenues which might be open to us to reconstruct the missing data. Having said that, where blocks (80 names) are omitted from the index, you would be very unlucky to lose both partners! FreeBMD will, even without extraction of the extra data from the GRO be able to say; page 123; Man-A Man-B Woman-C "3 entries! one person from this page is not indexed" So if one of the men matched, and there is a blank for a female, you might have an avenue to explore. -- Dave Mayall