General Register Office Indexes

The GRO Indexes are quarterly alphabetical indexes to the registers of births, marriages and deaths held by the General Register Office.  They are described more fully in official publications and in introductory books to family history.

They have been searched for Jeggo references and the results tabulated on three web pages:
. GRO Births . . GRO Marriages . . GRO Deaths .

In effect, the indexes were searched for names beginning Jeg.., of which the commonest is in fact Jeggo, at least until recent decades when immigration has produced some new ones.  In the tabulations, names which could be related to Jeggo or possible misreadings have usually been included, while names which are unlikely to be relevant have usually been omitted.  The indexes have not been searched for names beginning Jag.., Jig.. etc..

In a year or two (probably) the sort of searches we have done will become unnecessary, thanks to FreeBMD.

About the GRO Indexes

If you do not find the information you are looking for this may be for a number of reasons.

It was not compulsory to register births until 1875.  Many births, particularly of illegitimate children, were not registered in the early days of civil registration.  Some children had not been named by the time they were registered -- they may be entered in the index as male or female at the end of the surname entries.

The index is sometimes unreliable because:-

• Clergy failed to make copies of marriages regularly each quarter.
• Some returns were sent long after they were due.
• Some returns were duplicated and were indexed twice.
• Some entries were sent in too early and were cancelled by the Registrars and not indexed.
• Some entries were only partially copied (e.g., witnesses omitted from marriage records).
• Registrars failed to check the "due succession of numbers" in the copy register received.  (It is calculated that 50,000 marriage entries may be missing between 1837 and 1900 for this reason.)
• Copying by the clergy assumed that their handwriting would be legible and their copying accurate.  Copies by local registrars sent to the Registrar General could introduce further errors and misreadings.
• Indexing clerks included variant readings in the indexes when they were unable to read the handwritten copies.  In the case of marriages, if the parties signed their names in a way which was different to the clerk's entry these were indexed also.
• The clerks' indexing was not checked.  Fathers were indexed instead of the parties.  Names were mis-indexed (Henry instead of Hannah, Trench instead of French).  Entries on the back of a page were sometimes missed.
• In the 1970s some of the manuscript indexes were typed and many errors were introduced.  The originals were destroyed.
• Some pages were omitted from the microfiche copy;  you can only tell this has happened by comparing the last name on one frame with the first name on the next.
• From 1866 onwards the indexes were printed but there are gaps in name sequences pointing to omissions.

FreeBMD

One thing you can do using FreeBMD that you cannot do using the paper (or microfiche) indexes is search by date+volume+page.  Used for marriages, this often enables you to narrow down the number of possibilities for the name of a spouse to two (but sometimes more, eg if there are alternative spellings).  In conjunction with other data, eg census records which give a wife's Christian name but not her maiden name, it can lead to an identification.  Brilliant!

The number of entries on FreeBMD has grown as follows:

January 1999	25,000
February 2000	1,000,000
January 2001	5,000,000
November 2001	21,000,000
December 2003	82,000,000