The Federation of Family History Societies has released a two-CD-ROM set containing previously unpublished records of interest to genealogists. The National Burial Index for England and Wales indexes more than 5.4 million burials in England and Wales from 1538 to 2000. It is not a complete index to all burials, but it represents an enormous effort by Family History Societies and Groups to make available a large amount of information easily searchable in your own home. The National Burial Index, known as the NBI, contains high-quality British data. Thanks to TWR Computing, I had a chance to use this new resource this week.

Installation of the required software for Windows was quick and easy. This is a "freestanding" CD-ROM; all the required software is included. The NBI software has one feature that I had never seen before. I happen to have two CD-ROM drives in my computer; one is a read/write drive while the other is a read-only CD-ROM drive. The National Burial Index fills two CD-ROM disks and allows you to insert one in each drive. I was able to use all the data on two disks without having to remove one and insert a second, like most other CD-ROM software require. If you only have one CD-ROM drive, you can still use this set. However, you may have to occasionally exchange disks to look at either the earlier years on disk one or the later years on disk two.

I started the program and never did look at the instructions. The first screen that appears looks a bit like an empty spreadsheet; columns with headings of Burial Date, Forename, Surname, Age, County, and Place Details. Above the columns were seventeen icons for search, print, save, etc. I found that I could also use the pull-down menus for even more functions.

I clicked on the icon that looked like binoculars to start a Search. I entered the surname Towler, a name of interest to the editor of this newsletter. I then clicked on "GO." The search took about five seconds on my PC and then displayed a list of two-hundred and eight-six Towler burials. I found that I could click on any column heading and the information would almost instantly be re-sorted by that column. (Editor’s note: As an example of the sorting feature, sorting the list of Towlers by burial location identified a dozen Towlers buried in the same cemetery as my ancestor, including possible twin brothers!)

I narrowed the search down by going back to the search screen and adding the forename (first name) of Robert. A few seconds later I was looking at a list of fourteen burials of men named Robert Towler, including one named Edward Robert Towler. You can search by almost any combination of surname, forename, county, place name, year (plus or minus up to fifty years) as well as by religious denomination. For first name and last name, you can specify to use exact spelling or to look for variant spellings.

You can also specify "wildcard" characters into the Surname box. These are the asterisk character (*) which stands for "any number of characters" (including none), and the question mark (?) which matches on a single character only. An example of this would be S*MMONDS which should return SIMMONDS and SYMMONDS, but also SAMMONDS etc.

The information provided in the National Burial Index is taken from parish, non-conformist, Roman Catholic, and cemetery registers. It includes (where available):

• County of burial
• Parish or cemetery where the event of burial was recorded
• Date of burial
• Forename(s) of the deceased
• Surname of the deceased
• Age
• The society or group that transcribed the record

This information is displayed in a table, which may be sorted on any column or on multiple columns. When you find records of interest, you can tag them and then export those records to the Windows clipboard or other applications.

The NBI does not contain full transcriptions of the burial records; it is simply an abbreviated finding-aid based on records that were sometimes difficult to read. As with other sources of transcribed records, the user should never, ever accept the details of an entry at face value. Instead, the data displayed should be considered as a strong possibility, which then needs to be verified by other means. You should always check the original source record. Once you view the original source record, you may find further details not mentioned in the computerized transcriptions.

The National Burial Index also includes mapping software that interacts with the data. The maps display:

• Parishes covered by the National Burial Index, including a table of Counties, Places/Parishes, Church/Chapel, and date range covered. The columns in the table may be sorted as desired. You can also double-click on a listed location name to display the document source and number of entries for that location.
• Parishes that match the results of your last search
• Regions

A bar graph is also available to show the count of people included in the Index for each year from 1538 to 2000.

Stephen Archer created the National Burial Index software for the Federation of Family History Societies. He deserves a lot of recognition for this fine product. More than fifty Family History Societies or Groups were involved with the project. Each appointed a coordinator who, in turn, recruited inputters, checkers, and correctors. Wherever possible, transcriptions were made from original source records; however, where this was not feasible, other sources were used, such as microfiche transcriptions or printed registers.

The National Burial Index contains transcriptions of 5,417,480 records (over 5.4 million) records. I noticed that the CD-ROM was labeled "First Edition." This project is still ongoing, and I expect to see future releases with even more records.

The National Burial Index also has three printed report formats:

• The Basic Report produces a listing of the Results Table, one burial entry per line
• The Detailed Report produces a listing of the Results Table, but it includes all the available information for each burial entry
• The NBI Place Report produces a listing for a single county of the places included in the NBI.

Unlike some other genealogy CD-ROM disks that I have used, the National Burial Index allows the user to easily export data in a variety of formats:

• Gedcom 5.5—a format designed for the interchange of genealogical information via different software packages. You can import GEDCOM 5.5 files into all modern genealogy programs, although I strongly suggest that you first make a backup of your existing database before doing any imports.
• DBF—You can export to a database file (dBase III format, file extension .DBF). A DBF files can be imported into many other programs, such as Access, Excel etc.
• HTML—This option creates a simple web page file (HTML format), suitable for displaying on a web page or importing into a word processing package that accepts HTML format.

You can export either the whole Results Table or just the records you select (tag), if any.

The minimum requirements to use the National Burial Index are a PC with Pentium processor or higher, running Windows 95/98/NT/2000 or ME with suggested minimum of 8 megabytes of RAM memory. A VGA screen (640 by 480 pixels) should work, but SVGA (800 x 600) and above is recommended.

I demonstrated this CD-ROM set to Pam Clark, the editor of this newsletter. Pam’s ancestry is 50 percent English in the past few centuries, so when she saw this CD-ROM set she almost kicked me out of my chair to take control herself. She quickly found records of interest. A few minutes later she declared, "Given the difficulty of searching English vital records, this CD-ROM set is really useful!"

The National Burial Index for England and Wales is produced by the Federation of Family History Societies and is available from a number of sources. I obtained my copy from TWR Computing. The price is £30.00, which is approximately $50 in U.S. funds. You can order it directly and safely online from TWR Computing’s secure order form. Payment by credit card avoids the difficulties of sending currency or checks to other countries. For more information, or to order the National Burial Index for England and Wales CD-ROM set online from TWR Computing, go to: www.twrcomputing.co.uk.