Tips for Locating Births, Deaths & Marriages in England

Last week in genealogy chat, one of our regular chatters was thrilled to announce that she had finally located evidence of her family in England and wanted to know how to locate birth and marriage information to verify the information she had and continue the search. We discussed several options for searching the BMD (Birth,Death,Marriage) indexes which I thought the rest of you with English ancestors might find useful as well. My first stop is always FREEBMD where wonderful volunteers have transcribed millions of the BMD index records. Next, if FREEBMD doesn't have your ancestors (their work isn't yet complete), then try 1837online.com - which charges a reasonable fee for viewing the indexes, and includes all of them from 1837 - 2001. This site works best if you know exactly who you are searching for and can pin the date and or location down pretty closely. Alternatively, visit your local Family History Center, where you can borrow the indexes on microfilm from Salt Lake City for a small fee, and view them at your leisure.