Ancestry and Free BMD

I was under the impression that the BMD extracts on Ancestry were derived
from Free BMD.
A cousin has just given me a birth which she found in Ancestry, and I
thought I would check it in Free BMD before ordering the certificate.But
however carefully I look, I cannot find it in Free BMD at all. When I
checked with her she said she got it from the Beta list of Ancestry,
whatever that is.
Does Ancestry no longer use Free BMD, and if not, what does it use?
And can anyone explain what the Beta list is please?

Jenny M Benson...

What she is referring to is the images (scans) of the GRO indexes which
Ancestry are now making available. They are in need of a lot of
"polishing" yet, hence described as Beta.

The *transcriptions* of the indexes which Ancestry has are the ones
which FreeBMD supplies.

Jim Ward...

And the transcribers are making many silly spelling errors. Many pages I
have seen suggest the name you want is on a certain page, but it isn't. When
I check the image against the transcribed index, it makes you wonder how
they came up with what they did.In many cases the image is very clear on the
spelling.

Roger Mills \(aka Set Square\)...

The important thing is that the FreeBMD transcriptions - and the copies of
these held by Ancestry - only go as far as about 1910 or 1912. For anything
between then and 1984 you need to use the GRO (Beta) index images available
on Ancestry, but this just gives you a page containing dozens of names -
which *might* contain the one you're looking for - rather than individually
transcribed records.

With thanks,
Alwynne

singhals...

Just because she said it was "on Ancestry" doesn't necessarily mean it
was at FreeBMD. Someone sent me something last week "off ancestry" and
it took me 3 hours of concentrated searching to turn it up. Frankly I
was dumbfounded -- my impression has always been that she does her
research by serendipity and seance, but she had to spend serious time at
it to find _this_. (g)

Ron...

Ancestry still uses FreeBMD (only confusion is how far behind is their copy)

Ancestry also has copies of images of GRO index from 1837-1983 - this is
in Beta state - they tried to index the first and last names on each
page and sometimes this is wrong. But mostly you enter a name and you
get an image on which the name might be

This will take you to the BMD search

Images and FreeBMD are free

Ancestry also have BMD from 1984 in the payment required section