BACKGROUND

For the purposes of Registration, England and Wales are divided into Areas, and within each Area, into Registration Districts. The Registrars in each District record births, marriages and deaths as they are received and therefore maintain their own records. However, every three months, they are required to send all their registrations to the GRO, so that a complete national index can also be compiled.

Therefore, the GRO Index is organised by year and by quarter. If you refer to the first quarter, or second quarter, people will know what you mean, but generally the quarters are known as the March, June, September and December quarters.

Within each quarterly index, names are listed in alphabetical order, by surname then forename. However, to locate the certificate from the entry in the index requires the Volume, which refers to the Area, the Registration District and the Page Number. For example, if you wished to locate the marriage of Sarah Thorn, registered in Ormskirk in August 1892, you would first select the index for the September quarter, 1892. As the index is in alphabetical order, you would have no trouble locating the entry, which would show the name, Thorn, Sarah, the Volume 8b, the district Ormskirk and the Page Number 1348.

The Volume refers to the Area within England and Wales. In 1892, Area 8b consisted of the Districts of Liverpool, Toxteth Park, West Derby, Prescot and Ormskirk. There were about 30 Areas, some consisting of as little as 5 Districts where others had over 30 Districts. Before 1852, the Volume code assigned to each Area was a roman numeral, but this then changed to a number followed by a letter. Thus volumes 1a, 1b and 1c consist mainly of Districts in London and Middlesex. Volumes 2a, 2b and 2c cover the counties of Kent, Surrey, Berkshire and Hampshire, and so on across the Country. However, the Areas do not follow County boundaries, so Worcestershire, for example, is partly in Volume 6b and partly in Volume 6c.

The Page Number will then refer directly to the certificate, or almost. Each page might refer to 2 or 4 or more certificates. The important point is that the Page Number was assigned when the national index was compiled, and is therefore of no use if you are applying to a local Registrar for a certificate.

The really interesting point about the compilation of the national index was that for the purposes of assigning each certificate a Page Number, the copies of the registrations were always sorted into the same order within Volume. For example, when assigning page numbers for volume 1A, the compilers of the index always started with the Paddington District, then Kensington, then Fulham, Chelsea and so on. Having assigned Page Numbers to all the registrations, the compilers then produced the final index in alphabetical name order. If it was possible to take all the entries in the index for a year and a quarter, then sort them by Volume, and then within each Volume by Page Number, the list would magically appear in District order. For example, returning to the marriages in September quarter, 1892, all the registrations for Paddington have Page Numbers between 1 and 180. Kensington has Page Numbers from 181 to 408. Fulham then takes over up to Page Number 660 and so on, until the last District in that Volume, which is Hampstead, which has Page Numbers from 1319 to 1409.

If you go to the FreeBMD home page and click on Information, you will find a section headed 'Statistics'. Within this section is a link to 'Districts', which contains a section headed 'Page Ranges'. Try clicking on the link in 'Look here for an index by event type and year' and you will see that for a given year and quarter, approximate Page Number ranges have been calculated for you.

Checking your transcription against the Page Ranges can be very useful. For example, let say you have transcribed a Page Number as 845 by mistake, when it is clearly shown in the original as 345. (Unfortunately, we all make mistakes). If the Page Range for that District is, say, 234 to 409, you can be alerted to check your transcription of that entry. When you look back at the source, you immediately see your mistake and make the necessary correction.

Sometimes, a Page Range error is indicated, but in fact, the page number is correct, and the District is wrong - the checking program has correctly determined that the page number is out of sequence, but the cause is an incorrect District, so check the whole entry.

However, a very important word of warning. Sometimes, the error is in the GRO Index. I recently found an entry for the District Prestwich in Volume 8d where the Page Number is clearly identifiable from the scanned source as Page 753. No doubt about it! However, the page range for Prestwich in that quarter was 413 to 586. The error is in the GRO Index and so I have to transcribe what I see.

Therefore, if there are entries in your files, which are indicated as having a Page Range error, it is very likely that you have made a mistake and so it is well worth checking the entry, but be careful, you might be right.

In checking for Page Range errors, the software has to identify the District you have typed in, so it is easy to see spelling mistakes. For example, Aberystwith spelt as Aberystwyth or Bethnal Green spelt as Bethnal G. If you receive notification of these errors, again the software is unlikely to be wrong, so do please check the spelling of the District against the original.