I love blogging. Why? Because every day it challenges me to find out something new, or develop a little snippet of knowledge I have into something interesting to others. This month I am travelling around the world – not literally (I wish!), but in the blogging sense and Monday is European Day. Ever wondered about births, marriages and deaths overseas and at sea? Well, there are some GRO (General Register Office) indexes which cover these events but did you know that the military deaths in hospital in France between 1914 and 1920 are held at The National Archives? (RG35/45-69, if you are interested)…. well, I certainly didn’t!
It transpires that the RG33 and RG35 series are quite frankly littered with foreign registers and returns…. but what is even better is that both series are available on BMDRegisters.co.uk along with many other non-conformist and non-parochial records.
Other European countries are not within the RG series though ….overseas births 1922-1930 and deaths 1921-1929 for Romania are in FO 727 and marriages in Greece 1846-1890 are FO 83. There are many other FO references covering various countries from Poland to Russia, Sweden, Italy, Finland and dozens more. Geoffrey Yeo penned an excellent publication back in the 1980s (revised in the 1990s) entitled The British Overseas which will help enormously when tracing those pesky relations who travelled to the continent, and a thorough breakdown of TNA holdings is also available in Amanda Bevan’s book, Tracing Your Ancestors at The National Archives: The Website and Beyond. Happy Hunting!
