The 1916+ searches for births and marriages are just amazing - just need the same for the death records and we're home and dry when it comes to searching.

But it does beg the question - what's the point of FreeBMD's continuing to work on this. How on Earth did all that indexing suddenly become available?

"... what's the point of FreeBMD's continuing to work on this?"

Huh? Because as the name says, FreeBMD's transcriptions of the BMD indexes will remain FREE at its own website. This means that people who cannot afford the £80+ subscription to Ancestry will have free access to the BMD indexes as and when FreeBMD complete them and put them online - about 1.2 million distinct records every month.

What do you mean, "How on Earth did all that indexing suddenly become available?" FreeBMD is a UK registered charity for whom volunteers have been transcribing the indexes for years - VERY accurately I might add, because every entry is double-keyed by a real human being. So that they can afford to continue their amazing FREE work, FreeBMD have licensed Ancestry to use their indexes for 1837-c1915.

Ancestry have more recently put up their own OCR indexes for the births and marriages from 1916 to 1983, and we all know how accurate they are!

And don't forget the various county projects under the UKBMD banner, many of these have very comprehensive coverage and are done from the local records so can be more accurate that the GRO indexes.

The data became available because Ancestry had people transcribe it. A pretty impressive effort that has gone somewhat unheralded really. All the publicity went to the 1911 census but for me the BMD transcripts are a lot more useful.

The transcriptions perhaps aren't the highest quality but I've found them pretty good and the main problem is that there is no mechanism to get the transcriptions corrected, much as there isn't with most of the Ancestry data sets. This is where FreeBMD score highly. In an ideal world Ancestry would donate their transcripts to FreeBMD. FreeBMD should be able to use the data without compromising their quality control systems, though one would feel sorry for a volunteer tasked with checking submitted corrections to the Ancestry data.

I've actually found the quality if the Ancestry birth and marriage index transcriptions to be quite reasonable on the whole. Maybe I've just been lucky.

I always check the originals if I am slightly dubious over a transcription anyway, and I always check them when it comes to getting the GRO reference information.

Sorry if I offended anyone - the FreeBMD is absolutely marvellous no question, and of course I'm stupid - freeBMD being available to one and all.

Both FreeBMD and Ancestry's new marriage and Birth searches for the later part of the 20th century have provided leads that would have simply been impossible, or at least very hard otherwise.

I don't think you have offended anyone, and it is good to see someone singing the praises of Ancestry's birth and marriages indexes. Whatever people may think of the quality of the transcriptions, they've done the job and produced a great resource. I just think it amazing they pretty much introduced them by stealth instead of shouting from the rooftops.