Top Tip for BMD Searches

I am a member of a few Rootsweb genealogy lists and have found them to be very helpful in the past. This message came through a few days ago and I wish I'd known it sooner, it would probably be very helpful with quite a few of my ancestors.

I've asked permission to post it up here along with a link to Roy's Newbies' Guide to Genealogy & Family History which is well worth a read.

Anyway, less of me waffling and onto the helpful information.......

I imagine quite a lot of listers will already know this but on the off-chance
that not everyone does, here's a useful little tip for when you are
searching at the FreeBMD website for the entries of births, marriages
and deaths of relatives, etc. This is particularly useful for those running
one-name studies but it can also work for ordinary family historians if they
want to identify possible relatives with an unusual surname where it was
used as a middle name, i.e. possibly the name of a mother or
grandparent, etc.

If you enter nothing at all in the surname field but enter in the first name
field a surname with a + sign in front of it, this produces entries in which
the name was used either as a forename or a middle name. To give you
an example.....

Entering just "Stockdill" in the first name field produces only ONE entry,
for a child called Stockdill Middlebrook registered in 1896 at Dewsbury.
But if I enter "+Stockdill" in the first name field, nothing in the surname
field and choose All Types, this produces NINE other entries for births,
marriages and deaths where Stockdill was given as a middle name. I can
then identify all of these as being either relatives of mine or linked to my
one-name study.

Remember, it's important to put the plus sign before the name and the
more unusual the surname the better the chance you have of finding the
entries. Looking for people with Smith as a middle name will not be very
helpful!

I hope this helps some of the people who end up here looking for information on "how to"