New Zealand Birth, Death and Marriage Indexes on Findmypast

Findmypast have added the New Zealand Birth, Death and Marriage indexes to their collections.

The data comes from New Zealand Birth, Death and Marriage Historical Records website (NZ BDM), but the benefit of it being on the Findmypast platform is the improved search facilities. So let's take a look at what you can now do.

Searching without a surname
My great grandmother Christina Mathieson was born in 1883, I cannot find her birth on the NZ BDM website. I suspect this is because her surname is has been spelt incorrectly. However to search the NZ BDM website I need to know her surname.

On Findmypast I just put in her first name and year of 1883 and search.


637 Christina's born in 1883... I wonder if that makes it a popular name?


Page through a little way and I find her with her surname spelt incorrectly as Matthieson. I have to say that I had tried looking for her on the NZ BDM website with a variety of names but two "T's" was not one of the variants (I'll add it to my variant list).


Wildcard Searching
I can make this search even easier by limiting down the surnames to those that start with M by using the asterisk wild card.


Only 92 results and Christina appears on the first page.



I'm using the NZ Births here as an example, but wild cards work on the Deaths and Marriages too.

Brothers & Sisters
With the search on the NZ BDM website I could only search the births with a mother's name, now I can search with a father's name.


Amongst the 56 results you find:


Having searched for Neil Downey Mathison before I know there are variations on the spelling of Neil so I can even put a wildcard in the middle of his name to pick up the variations.


74 results this time and the extra child of Hector Mathieson (named for his grandfather). From what I know about the family I'm actually surprised to see this registration as I believe he was born in June and his parents married in August.

Brides and Grooms
Now when I am trying to find all the marriages of my family I can search for Brides and Grooms at the same time.



Don't forget you can then resort the results. I've chosen Registration Year for my search results.


Daughters that change name
Searching the deaths without a surname can of course help you to find the daughters in the family that marry and change their name. Hopefully they have an unusual combination of names to make it easier.

Dates
If you're like me one of the things that I didn't like about the NZ BDM Historical Records website was the need to put a starting date in for each search. Often I would just put in 1/1/1840 or some other decade based date. This is no longer required when searching on the FMP website.

However do remember that just like on the NZ BDM website there are limitations on what data is available.
  • Births have to have occurred 120 years ago (Stillbirths 50 years ago)
  • Marriages in relation to a person born 120 years ago or more
  • Deaths occurred at least 50 years ago or the person was at least 80 years old at time of death.
Good luck with your searching and let me know if you manage to find that missing person using the new search facilities on Findmypast.

Links:
NZ Birth, Death and Marriage Indexes

NZ Birth Index

NZ Marriage Index

NZ Death Index



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