On the use of FreeBMD and GRO

Often genealogy novices think that the way to discover their ancestors is an account with Ancestry, FindMyPast or both. It is when you are talking about records before births, marriages and death registration began in 1837, but often people don't know much about their grandparents' families, let alone their third great grandparents. There are two great things about FreeBMD - it does exactly what it says on the tin. It gives details about births, marriages and deaths, and it's free!

Most of us know who our grandparents are or were - but sometimes we don't know who their siblings were. The technique I describe isn't great when you have a Jones married to a Smith, but provided one name is relatively uncommon, it stands a good chance. I know that my grandmother was born in 1912 near Worksop as Ada Surtees: let's go to https://www.freebmd.org.uk/cgi/search.pl to search for her. We select Births, a surname of Surtees and a first name of Ada. We then press Find.

The result is shown below:

So we can see that my great-grandmother's maiden name was Hadley. Let's now find her marriage: we use the Marriages type and the Surname and Spouse/Mother surname fields leaving the date blank this time:

So we see Alice Maud Hadley marrying a Surtees in Newcastle under Lyme. If we click on the page number (85) we can see who she married:

Alice Maud Hadley married Joseph Chaytor Surtees in the second quarter of 1896. We can apply this same technique to go back to 1837, but two things need to be remembered:

• births only record mother's maiden name from 1911;
• recording of births was often 'overlooked' as we go further back into the Victorian era.

So how do we counter this? Let's attempt to go back another generation with Joseph Chaytor Surtees. We can search for his birth: never give a middle name in full, as they are often recorded as an initial, and sometimes not at all as they have been 'acquired'. We'll give an end date of December 1880 to avoid searching dates beyond which we couldn't have been born:

This gives the following result:

Here I have been very lucky, as it looks like I have two generations at once (indeed I have): but the younger Joseph Chaytor is the one we are looking for. How can we find his mother's name without ordering a certificate?

The answer lies with the GRO (General Register Office) site. Here you can register for free at https://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/ . Births go up to 100 years ago (1918 currently) and deaths to 1957. Additionally, any certificate reference you find at FreeBMD you can order here.

Go to https://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/certificates/indexes_search.asp then click Birth:

Enter Surname at Birth as Surtees, First Forename as Joseph, Second Forename as Chaytor, Gender as Male, Year as 1875. The result is shown below:

We see that the mother's maiden name was Shearer, and we are back two generations in a matter of minutes.