The following are answers to questions that I find are frequently asked about this site. Please read them to see if your question is answered here before sending your question to me. If your question is not answered here or you would like to pass along any comments or constructive suggestions please feel free to e-mail me. I regret that I may not be able to answer questions that are not related to the contents of this site specifically, such as where to go for different types of information. There are many other good sources of genealogical (and other!) information on the web, some of which are mentioned below.
Please note that this page was developed on the basis of experience with the British Isles numbers. I have only recently provided North American numbers and so I expect that more questions will arise and amore answers added here as time progresses.
(Click here to go back to the main page).
Click on your question from the list below or just scroll down through them all:
Why can't I find the place/person I'm looking for on this site?
Couldn't you tell me what dates are covered by each batch?
So where else can I go for information?
My town is listed in the wrong county/spelled wrong etc. Will you fix it?
I can't find St. Something (or conversely Saint Something) or there seems to be a batch number missing from it
Could you remember the surname I'm searching for between searches?
I've found batch numbers starting with A (or F, I, L, T etc.) Why are they not on this site?
Could you highlight batches I have already searched so I know where I've been?
I know my people are on the IGI in a certain town/village but I can't find them. What's up?
I know batch number XXXXXXX is for my town but it isn't on your site. What gives?
What happened to that batch that was there the other day?
You have Christenings and Marriages but what about Deaths/Burials?
I found a C series batch with only females - where are the guys?
Are you going to include the BVRI batch numbers?
Could you include a feature so I could go to the names starting with a particular letter in a batch?
Could you indicate which parishes are close to which other ones?
(Bit techie this one) - Could you put <name= > tags in for each town
so I can link to the right place on your site from mine?
Where's Middlesex?
I have only indexed what the LDS have in their index. If the place you are looking for isn't there it's almost certainly because they haven't indexed it themselves. If you can't find the person you are either looking in the wrong town or they have not appeared in the index or the dates in which you are interested are not covered in the IGI. The IGI concentrates on records pre 1837 although some places have entries for much later.
To the greatest extent possible, with the help of James Heald, this has already been done by obtaining the date ranges from the detail page of the first entry from each batch. I believe this may well provide a good indication of the ranges for the batches themselves. This is displayed on the relevant county page. For those batches where no date is shown this information does not appear on the detail page. There is also some information regarding dates of batch coverage which has been published elsewhere such as at http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~tyeroots/index4.html but I have not investigated its accuracy or completeness.
For information after 1837, when civil registration began, the GRO indexes are probably the place to start. Some of these have been transcribed by the Free BMD project. The family history society that covers your area of interest is also a good place to go - you can probably find them by doing a search on Google. Posting messages on appropriate Rootsweb mailing lists usually attracts some good information as well.
The simple answer is no. Sorry. I have listed everything exactly as found in the IGI, errors and all. To correct information piecemeal would take far too much time that could be usefully spent on bringing further helpful tools to the genealogical research community. Please try looking around in neighbouring counties for your place of interest.
Many parishes are listed under both St. and Saint Something - that's how the LDS did it - remember to look in both places
Actually this site does do that. However, that feature doesn't seem to work on some browsers. If you can figure out how I can fix this problem for your browser, please let me know and I will do it. If it is not working for you try using copy and paste (Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V on Windows machines) to save retyping the name by keeping it in the clipboard between searches.
Reviewing batches starting with A, F, I, L and T I find that these are all LDS patron submitted or church member related batches and so not part of the Controlled Extraction Program. In keeping with my stated policy of not including batches which are not part of this program, you will not find them on this site. You may notice some T series batches that I have included - these were done before I was aware they were not part of this program and so I don't plan to remove them since people may have already become used to having them around!
Again I already do that but some browsers (e.g. Netscape 4.75) don't seem to work properly in that regard. The same point applies as above if you can figure out how to do it for your browser.
You may have found them previously in a batch that has an all numeric number. I am not currently including any completely numeric batch numbers since they usually relate to LDS Patron Submitted entries. Since these entries were not part of the Controlled Extraction Program they are somewhat unreliable and so of less use than the batches beginning with a letter. That having been said, I may well take a look at including them as an appendix at some future time.
First please look to see if this number starts with a letter and is in one of the ranges listed on the main page here. If it is, then please check it out by trying it at familysearch.org. If you find entries there please let me know as there has clearly been a problem. If your number is outside these ranges and begins with a letter, please, again, check it out and then let me know, as I might have to search some ranges I was not aware of. If the batch number does not start with a letter then please see the answer to the previous question on this page.
I found, on doing an in depth analysis of the batches, that some of them covered a large number of locations. I felt that including them in the county lists for every location that they covered could be misleading and would clutter up the county pages themselves. Therefore I have created a special section of this site devoted exclusively to the 261 batches that have entries from more than 20 different locations. Many of these are in the 'T' series or cover the counties of Suffolk or Norfolk, the Channel Islands or places in Ireland. You can access that page by clicking here.
The LDS have indexed only Christenings and Marriages and so there is no burial information in the IGI. The National Burial Index is, however, available on CD from the Federation of Family History Societies.
The following is an explanation from the director of the LDS library that was forwarded to me by an interested user of this site: "Thank you for your note. Your observations are correct and at least to some degree explainable. More females attend LDS temples than males creating an imbalance in the inventory system. To solve that issue, the batches were split into male and female (J and K batches). The females were sent to the temples, and in some cases the male portion of the batch has not yet been sent, but is waiting in the inventory." I'm not personally convinced this totally explains it but that is the official explanation anyway. That same user also forwarded me this observation; "Incidentally, I have since discovered that some of the missing males are in the Vital Records Index - for example for Dauntsey, Wiltshire, 1653-1885, females only are in the IGI, both males and females are in the VRI."
The British Vital Records Index (BVRI) is not available on line as far as I know and so it would not be possible to hot link the numbers to the information contained in them so I am not sure of the benefit of including them here. I believe you can find these numbers are on the CDs on which the BVRI is distributed. I haven't had time to investigate these further so far.
Since the LDS dos not provide that feature themselves, that would require me to scan all of every batch to build a database of the starting page number for each letter of the alphabet for each batch. This would require far too much time and load on the IGI servers so I regret that this potentially most useful feature will not be available in the forseeable future.
That would be very nice and I may look at building such a database or providing hotlinks to online maps. In the meantime you can download an excellent free Parish Locator program from http://www.parloc.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/ParLoc.htm which you can use in conjunction with this site.
Already done - see Mark Howells's excellent Norfolk site where, last time I checked, he had linked Palling and Paston to my site as a test. He might have done more by now. If you are going to make use of this please contact me so I can fill you in on the format of this tag for some odd situations (or by all means look at the HTML source code yourself if you want)
It is included under "London" in the IGI.
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The batch numbers on this site belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints