Genealogy Chat

Hi All.
Could anyone please help.
Is there a way I could find out if a deceased couple had any children? If they did the children are probably still alive.
Kind regards,
Dave.

If you mean in England or Wales .........

go to www.freebmd.org.uk

enter father's surname

enter mother's surname in relevant box

enter estimated years when births might have taken place.


I usually don't bother entering either county or registration areaunless I am absolutely certain the parents never ever moved.


Freebmd is good for births. marriages and deaths from July 1 1837 to about 1975/1980


Ancestry carries bmds to as late as 2005 ......... but that is a subscription site

If you mean Scotland ..................


you have to go to Scotland's people, which is a pay-per-view site .... you have to buy credits.

It is possible, I understand, to do a free view to see if there could be any registrations of interest, but then you have to buy the credits to see the details.

Thank-you Sylvia, much appreciated.

you're very welcome

Re Scotland's People -

unfortunately it's not possible to use mother's maiden surname in your search for a birth after 1854 - so unless the father had a very unusual surname, or you know where the birth took place, it's not likely you' d be able to pick out which births might be relevant to your deceased couple.

ah ................

AG ................. I didn't realise that. It's good to know.

AG - you can use the mum's maiden surname if you search at FS, specifically:

Scotland Births and Baptisms, 1564-1950
https://familysearch.org/search/collection/1771030?collectionNameFilter=false

This works for 1855 thru 1875-ish - the entries for this time span are from the GROS index.
Their batch numbers all have the form c11ppp1 or C11ppp3
Here ppp is the parish number, e.g., 218 for Longside (in the far north, the parish # will need padding out to 3 digits with leading zeros).
The latter form is only used when there is too large a number of births to fit in a single batch. (A big city can overwhelm this system - FS deals with this by inventing fake parish numbers to cope with the overflow - like 906 for Old Machar and using the Old Machar parish number (168) for the contained city of Aberdeen)

Here's a hit from a lookup for unnamed kids of my gg grandparents, John Greig and Margaret Slessor

https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:XYG1-54Q
Indexing Project (Batch) Number C11218-1

For a city of Aberdeen example, try the children of my cousins Pater Anderson and Jane McDonald. - this is their marr:
https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:XTNJ-JRM
Indexing Project (Batch) Number M11192-1 (Ellon is parish number 192)

Thanks, mgnv.

I must go back over the Scottish side of my tree. There's a lot more online now without involving SP credits, than there was when I first researched it.

This morning, on FS, I've discovered a previously unknown child (born 1872 - in the time-frame you mention) of a couple in my tree - unknown to me, that is!
Presumably died in infancy, as not on 1881 census.