GRO Index and FreeBMD: How to Search BMD Indexes

Every birth, marriage and death registered in England and Wales since 1 July 1837 is listed in the national indexes kept by the General Register Office (GRO). The indexes do not give you the full entry, but they tell you that an event was registered, when, in which registration district, and the volume and page where the GRO copy sits. That reference is what you need to order a certificate.

You can search the indexes free in two main places. The GRO’s own online index covers births and deaths only, and adds details that the old printed indexes lack. FreeBMD, a volunteer transcription of the printed quarterly indexes, is the easiest free place to search marriages and to match husbands with wives.

How the national indexes are arranged

The indexes begin with the September quarter of 1837. Until the end of 1983 each year is split into four quarters, named after the last month: March (January to March), June, September and December. From 1984 the indexes are arranged by year only. Within each quarter or year, entries are listed alphabetically by surname, then forename, exactly as they were registered.

Two points catch almost everyone out. First, the index is arranged by date of registration, not date of the event: a birth on 20 December may be registered in January and appear in the following March quarter. Second, events were registered in the district where they happened, not where the family lived, so a hospital birth or a death away from home can sit in a neighbouring district.

An index entry gives the surname, forename(s), registration district, volume and page, plus extra details that changed over time. The printed indexes that FreeBMD and the commercial sites transcribe show the following:

Index	Extra detail in the printed index	From
Births	Mother’s maiden surname	September quarter 1911
Deaths	Age at death	1866
Deaths	Date of birth instead of age	April 1969
Marriages	Surname of the spouse	1912

Searching the GRO online index

The GRO index is free, but you must register an account on the GRO certificate ordering site at gro.gov.uk and log in to search. Accounts unused for two years are removed. At the time of writing (September 2026) the GRO states that the online index covers:

Births from 1837 to 1934, and from 1984 up to two years ago
Deaths from 1837 to 1957, and from 1984 up to two years ago
No marriages or civil partnerships

The index was compiled again from the GRO’s digitised records rather than copied from the printed volumes. For historical births the GRO has, where possible, added the mother’s maiden surname before 1911, and historical deaths show the age at death from 1837. A dash in a field means the detail was not captured. The maiden surname shown is the one under which the mother first married, which is not always her birth surname.

How to fill in the search form

Choose births or deaths, and the sex. Event type, surname, sex and year are the minimum. Some records have no sex captured and are always included, so a boy’s search can return a girl’s name.
Surname. Enter the surname at the time of registration. Use the drop-down to include phonetic or similar variants if you are unsure of the spelling.
Forename. Optional. The “derivatives” option also finds forms such as Betty for Elizabeth.
Year and range. Enter the year of registration and widen it by up to two years either side.
Mother’s maiden name or age at death. Optional, but a good way to cut a common surname down to a handful of results. Age at death can be widened by 1, 2, 5 or 10 years.
Quarter, district, volume and page. Leave these blank on a first search and add them only to narrow a long list.

Results come back in year and quarter order with the district, volume and page, and either the mother’s maiden name or the age at death. A search that returns more than 250 results must be narrowed. If you spot a mistake, the GRO has an error report form at the foot of the results page.

Searching FreeBMD

FreeBMD is run by Free UK Genealogy, a registered charity, and its volunteers transcribe the printed GRO indexes of births, marriages and deaths. It is free, with no registration, and its index information runs from 1837 to 1999. The site states plainly that the whole period has not yet been transcribed, so open its coverage charts for the event and year before you conclude that an entry is missing.

Using the search form

Select the type of event. You can select births, marriages and deaths together.
Enter a surname. Tick the phonetic option to match names by Soundex, or use wildcards: “*” matches any number of characters and “?” exactly one, so “Thorn*” finds Thorn, Thorne and Thornton. Do not combine wildcards with a phonetic search.
First names match anything that starts with what you type unless you tick exact match, so “Stan” finds Stanley and Stanislaw.
Set a date range in quarters, and add a county or district only if you are reasonably sure of it.

Each result shows the quarter, district, volume and page. The spectacles icon opens a scan of the index page the volunteer transcribed, which is worth checking whenever a letter or number looks doubtful.

Matching a bride and groom

Marriage indexes list each person separately. From 1912 each entry gives the spouse’s surname. Before 1912 you rely on the page: from 1852 a register page generally holds two marriages, before that up to four. Click the page number in a FreeBMD result and it lists everyone indexed on that page, usually four or eight people. The bride is among them, but a shared page only narrows the options: confirm the match with the certificate or a parish register.

Several commercial sites, including Ancestry, Findmypast and TheGenealogist, have their own versions of the indexes, some with page images. FamilySearch, free with an account, has index collections for births to 2008, marriages to 2005 and deaths to 2007, which helps for marriages after the years FreeBMD has finished.

Registration districts and volume numbers

A registration district is not a parish or a town, and districts were created, merged and renamed many times. When a result names a district you do not recognise, look it up in the UKBMD list of registration districts in England and Wales. For each district it gives the dates it existed, its sub-districts, the civil parishes it covered and the GRO volume numbers used in the national indexes. GENUKI also has a list of the GRO index volume codes by county and addresses for current register offices.

Volume numbers changed over time. Manchester, for example, is volume XX from 1837 to 1851, 8d from 1852, and 10E from 1946 to 1974.

Local register office indexes

The GRO holds a copy of every register. The originals stay with the local register office, and the GRO copies introduced some errors and omissions. Since 2000 family history societies have worked with register offices to put local indexes online, starting with Cheshire. The UKBMD Local BMD project lists them, including Bath, Berkshire, Cheshire, Cumbria, Lancashire, North Wales, Shropshire, Staffordshire, West Midlands, Wiltshire and Yorkshire.

These indexes come from the original registers, so they can correct a misspelt GRO entry, and many record the church or register office where a marriage took place. Their references are the local office’s own register and entry numbers, not the GRO volume and page, so use them to order from that local office rather than from the GRO.

Search tactics when the entry will not appear

Search by registration date. Widen by at least one quarter either side, and by a year or more for births before 1875, when parents were not yet legally responsible for registering.
Search without a forename. A child registered before a name was chosen appears at the end of the surname as “male” or “female”. Adults may be indexed under a first name they never used.
Try spelling variants deliberately. Soundex keeps the first letter, so Wojcik and Voycik fall under different codes. Run each first letter as a separate search, or use a short wildcard stem such as “Woj*”.
Check the neighbouring districts. Hospitals, workhouses and nursing homes often sit just across a district boundary.
Use the other index. If FreeBMD fails for a birth or death, try the GRO index, and the reverse. For marriages, try both parties.

What the index reference is for

A full reference such as March quarter 1954, district, volume 2a, page 222 identifies one entry. Quote it when you order a certificate or a GRO PDF: our guide to birth, marriage and death certificates in England and Wales explains the formats, what each certificate shows and how to order. If a figure on a printed index is unreadable, the GRO offers a free service to clarify the reference, though it will not confirm that the entry is the person you want.

The index also rebuilds families on its own: births with the same mother’s maiden name in one district are usually siblings, and a marriage date tells you when to look for the couple in the census and the 1939 Register.

Finding Polish-born people in the indexes

Polish-born men and women appear in the indexes like anyone else, but under whatever spelling the registrar wrote. Polish letters were dropped, so Wiśniewski becomes Wisniewski, and phonetic spellings such as Shepanski for Szczepański are common. Forenames were often anglicised, with Jan indexed as John and Stanisław as Stanley, and some families later changed the surname altogether. Build a list of possible spellings with our guide to anglicised Polish surnames before you start.

Many men of the Polish forces stationed in Britain during and after the Second World War married British women. These marriages are in the ordinary marriage index, and from 1912 the entry names the spouse’s surname, so searching the bride’s surname against a range of Polish-looking surnames in her home district can be quicker than guessing the groom’s spelling. Their children’s birth entries then show the Polish surname with the mother’s maiden name.

As an illustrative example with invented details: a family remembers that a grandfather called Stanley married Ethel Brown in Lancashire soon after the war. A FreeBMD search for marriages of Ethel Brown in Lancashire, 1945 to 1950, returns an entry with the spouse surname Wojcik. Searching that surname with a wildcard finds the groom indexed as Stanislaw Wojcik on the same page, and the certificate then gives his age and his father’s name.

That certificate is the bridge to Poland. A marriage entry names the groom’s father, and a death registered from April 1969 onwards gives the date and place of birth, although the place may say only “Poland”. Once you have a town or village, our guide to finding a birth entry in Poland shows how to identify the right parish or civil registry office and search its records.