Re the discussion on various BMD indexes, I recently subscribed to the S&N paid online service, and find their BMD indexes appear to be facsimiles, not transcriptions (ie some are handwritten, some typescript, just as in the books at Family Record Centre). This seems to me a major advantage over other systems (none of which I've looked at) said to be using transcriptions, OCR or otherwise. Pages come down as PDF, opened in Acrobat Reader. (Please note, I have no connection with S&N except as a customer). -- Denys Wells

"Denys Wells" <denyswells@freeuk.com> wrote : > Re the discussion on various BMD indexes, I recently subscribed to the S&N > paid online service, and find their BMD indexes appear to be facsimiles, > not > transcriptions (ie some are handwritten, some typescript, just as in the > books > at Family Record Centre). This seems to me a major advantage over other > systems (none of which I've looked at) said to be using transcriptions, > OCR > or otherwise. Pages come down as PDF, opened in Acrobat Reader. > (Please note, I have no connection with S&N except as a customer). The usual presentation of these indexes on-line, except for FreeBMD, is to provide images of the GRO index pages with only the first and last entries on each page actually transcribed. FreeBMD provide images of an increasing number of pages, linked to their individual transcriptions, and this seems to work well. 1837 Online have, I believe, checked most or all of their page-indexing transcribed records, while Ancestry appear to have relied solely on OCR so far; the result is that Ancestry's page indexing can be pretty dodgy while 1837 Online are pretty reliable. I haven't yet tried the S & N version so can't comment. John B Leic., Eng