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Districts, Volumes and Pages |
All Births, Marriages and Deaths are recorded in Registers, typically with 4 or 8 entries per page. These Registers are grouped into Volumes which are identified by a number, possibly followed by a single letter. Early registers were identified by Roman Numerals (e.g. XII) and later ones by Arabic numerals (e.g. 12) but in FreeBMD we only use Arabic numberals for searching (so volume 12 would find volume XII).
A particular page in a register is uniquely identified by
Each entry is registered in a District (sometimes referred to as a Registration District or RD). Each Volume of entries covers a specific collection of districts.
FreeBMD analyses the entries in its database and provides a number of tables that relate District, Volume and Page - these are explained here as are the issues relating to different spellings of a district.
FreeBMD contains information about the entries in the Registers but this information has not be transcribed directly from these Registers. Instead the information is transcribed from the Indexes which contain summaries of the Registers. These Indexes were created by the registration authority to enable entries to be more easily found.
Each page of the index has a number which is the Index Page. This should not be confused with the Register Page which applies to the entries featured on the index page.
All of these concepts are shown on the following index page sample:
