The births, baptisms and marriages on BMDregisters.co.uk are pretty much the same as those found on the IGI and the British Isles Vital Records Index, so it's always a good idea to try them first before parting with your hard-earned on BMDregisters. The IGI is pretty much complete for the main series of Non-parochial Registers held by TNA in RG4, and most (but definitely not all) of the births in the two Registries in RG5 are on the BIVRI (although I have seen some of these entries on the IGI too). Both indexes allow a certain amount of flexibility with the spelling of names, which is helpful, and there will be differences in interpretation so it will always be worth trying all of them if you are stuck. You can also search by parents' names on the IGI an d BIVRI, while BMDregisters has an 'all names' option in its advanced search, which is cruder, but can include the names of grandparents in some entries.
There is a smaller collection of Non-parochial Registers in RG8 that will be added to BMDregisters later, as will the Quaker records in RG6, and the fiendishly complex records in RG7, which are not entirely accurately referred to as 'Fleet Marriage Registers'. Finally TNA's collection of Miscellaneous Foreign Returns in RG32-36 will be added - and those are even more fiendish than the 'Fleet' stuff. Great stuff, but 'non-standard' doesn't even begin to describe them!
In its present form, the two great advantages of BMDregisters are the links to digitised images, and also that they have indexed the burial registers, most of which had never been indexed before.
Mean_genie
