The Local BMD Project exists to accomplish the goal of making the indexes to the local register office civil records of births, marriages and death available online. It’s a project that has been running for over two decades and covers several areas across England and Wales, which together provide access to the milestone figure of 50 million BMD index entries. Let’s look at how it began, and how you and your local family history society can help the project grow.
An ‘accidental’ start
In August 2000 the South Cheshire Family History Society (SCFHS) were approached by the Crewe Registrar and asked to place indexes to the local register office marriages online. These were duly added to the SCFHS website. At a similar time the Registrar from Chester had asked the main Family History Society of Cheshire a similar request to host their local marriage indexes too. Soon though, both societies pooled their resources and produced a combined site that also had some birth and death indexes. This was the fledgling ‘Cheshire BMD’ website.
Other societies liked the idea and asked whether the software could be used to create BMD sites for other areas. So, Cheshire BMD was soon followed by a Yorkshire BMD, Lancashire BMD, Staffordshire BMD and North Wales BMD – with this
