The ONS BMD indices.

[ChasH]

Chatters, have you ever considered how the UK's GRO birth, marriage and death indices were actually produced?

Think on this:- Originally over 650 district and sub-district register offices (RO's) issued bmd certificates and today they are still held by superintendents registrar (SR's) at fewer RO's.

Each SR was responsible for making returns to the General Register Office - Somerset House then St Catherine's House and now the General RO at Stockport.

So, all these bits of paper arrived at, say, Somerset House  (Google for info.) and the real work began.

Remember, indices in Volumes and Pages; alphabetical order and by yearly quarters.  Hence Vol. and Page numbers mean nothing to LRO's.

There must have been hundreds of clerks and messengers dashing every whichway!  The more one thinks about it the more one appreciates why errors crept in.  I wonder if anybody today really understands just how it was done in the mid 1800's. 

Have a go at drawing a flow chart, you'll soon be amazed!

A truly Hurculean task repeated every three months!

Regards

Chas

[Necromancer]

http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/mikefost/

[ChasH]

http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/mikefost/

Yes, a very knowlegeable tome, we have a copy of the 1998 edition and in places you must admit, it's rather heavy going.    I refer you to page 45 where it informs the reader that nobody in the ONS appears to have any knowledge of how the indexes were produced or the sorting procedures used in the 1800's.   Hence my opening the topic.

Regards

Chas

[Necromancer]

I wonder if anybody today really understands just how it was done in the mid 1800's.

it would seem not then   

..... the 1998 edition and in places you must admit, it's rather heavy going

I find it a great cure for insomnia !

[Mean_genie]

When the quarterly returns arrived at Somerset House they were checked for obvious errors - eg incomplete entries, registration dates earlier than birth dates etc. The Correspondence section tried to sort out these queries, then the sheets were arranged in order within their districts, then into volumes. This is when page numbers were allocated, and these are the volume and page numbers we use to order certificates.

A team of transcribers then copied the name(s), district, volume and page onto special transcription sheets. These were cut into individual slips, which the sorters then arranged into alphabetical order. The sorted slips were passed to the indexers, who wrote up the final indexes onto parchment sheets, which were bound into volumes for the searchroom shelves. From 1866 the sorted slips were sent to a printer for typesetting, until 1910 when this process was brought back in-house, and the indexes were typed.

That's the short version, anyway!

Mean_genie