National Burial Index for England & Wales 3rd Edition

Third Edition containing 18.4 million records from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries covering some 9100 burial locations in 50 counties. Please note that as this is an ongoing project not all burials will be found in the index and that some counties have greater coverage than others.

The National Burial Index (NBI) for England and Wales assists family historians find burial records and, in doing so, complements the International Genealogical Index (IGI) which is mainly a finding aid to baptisms and marriages. The NBI is now a national archive, giving worldwide access to sources held by those local repositories and family history societies and groups participating in the project. A cumulative edition is produced at approximately four-yearly intervals.

Please note that the NBI for England and Wales does not contain monumental inscription records.

Burial records are transcribed and computerised mainly by family history societies although a few individuals contribute records. These records come from different types of sources: parish registers, bishop's transcripts, earlier transcripts or printed registers. Each society appoints a coordinator who recruits volunteers to transcribe the burial records. The coordinator maintains a cumulative society burials database which the society may publish at any time of their choosing. Data collection progresses either by the use of a Shroud computer program (designed for the project) or by any program that the coordinator chooses, for example, Excel or Access. Whatever the program, a definition of the NBI database is supplied. Periodically the coordinator sends the most recent batches of burial files to the NBI Data Manager for further checking with syntactical validation.

The aim of the Project is to cover all burials found in registers in all locations (parishes) throughout England and Wales. Family history societies may choose the parishes and time intervals they transcribe. Although coverage in terms of years and locations is now much more extensive than the burials published previously, there are still gaps because not all family history societies are able or willing to join the project due to restrictions to access records, a lack of volunteers or other commitments.

The NBI includes the following information(where available):

Forename(s) and surname of the deceased

Day, month, year of burial

Age

Details of the place (parish) where the event was recorded

The county where this is located (pre-1832 list of counties)

The society, group or individual who transcribed the record

The decision to exclude certain useful items of information from the NBI such as relationships, abode and occupation was a demand of most participating family history societies at the NBI planning stage. This is in accordance with the notion that the NBI is an index and not a full transcription.

System Requirements:

A PC with Windows 98/XP/Vista/7. At least 32 Mb memory recommended, CD-ROM or DVD-Rom drive; monitor with screen resolution of 800 x 600 or more. Not suitable for Apple Mac users.

Unlike previous editions the entire NBI (search program and data) is installed entirely on to your hard drive which allows each search to operate on the entire dataset, 1538-2008. This change from 4 CDs which were needed to view different historical periods has allowed us to pack the entire dataset on to a single CD. It is still necessary, however, to have the original CD in your drive when you start the program because the disk includes a copy-protection system to prevent unscrupulous copying - a problem in the past. The Viewer program includes facilities for printing the results from searches, and exporting to other applications via the clipboard or via an external file (comma-delimited, HTML and Gedcom are provided).