Advanced Facilities

Introduction

This page gives information about advanced facilities that are available from FreeBMD. Most users of FreeBMD will be researching their family tree and will use only the facilities of the search and, indeed, many will be unaware of the more complex aspects of the search as described here. However, there will also be a number of users who wish to use more advanced research facilities and it is to this community of users that this page is addressed.

Approximately every month the FreeBMD database is updated with new transcriptions. In addition to the main search database that is created at that time further information is produced some of which is made available through the facilities described below; the remaining information is used purely for diagnostic purposes. The information made available exists as reports or other facilities (such as a search). Because some of the reports are large they are available as a structured hierarchy of pages.

This information is provided on an as-is basis. Although FreeBMD will consider corrections to the presentation of this information, this will not be given as high a priority as corrections to the search database. Also we do not intend to answer question on how the information can used. That is an exercise for the reader!

Before using any of the facilities below please ensure that you are familiar with

the full facilities of the standard FreeBMD search - maybe you don't need to use these advanced facilities after all - and
the details of the Uncertain Character Format - you will need this information to understand the results of the advanced facilities.

Districts

General information about Districts can be found here, which references the following reports (the latter two are probably of less interest).

District Aliases: When creating the FreeBMD database district names that do not correspond to the precise official district name are aliased to the official district. This mapping gives all the aliases that have been created for each official district.
County Mapping: This map gives the the districts that are in each county and the dates between which this was true.
District to Volume Mapping: This listing gives the volumes that have been found for each district and for which years.
District with Volume Clashes: This listing gives the volumes that have been found for each year against each district; since one would expect only one volume against each year this indicates a probable error

Page Ranges

The following two reports give the page ranges that have been found for each district and volume. This information is only included where there is sufficient data so if a district or quarter is missing there is not enough data. Because of the nature of the data the determination of the page range is done statistically and is not necessarily precise.

Indexed by event type: This listing gives the page range for each district within a event and quarter.
Indexed by District: This listing gives the page range for each event and quarter for each district.

Names

The surnames and given names found in the database can be searched using this facility. Note that this is a search of the unique names in the database, not the database itself. The given names have been split, so an entry with three given names would be counted as three separate names, not one name with three components. There are two exceptions to this rule

St John is counted as one name and
Names with less than two characters are not included (they are assumed to be initials)

Postems

To view the Postems that have been left by users use this facility. The Postems are listed in the order they were created but the facility offers the capability to filter on different parts of Postem data. Note that Postems can get "unlinked" meaning that the record has changed and we can no longer match the Postem. Such Postems are shown in red. Tidying these is a manual process that is is done on a regular basis.

Record Counts

The different record counts can be viewed here. These show the number of entries found for each quarter and there is also a facility to compare the values between different updates of the database.

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