ROTHERHAM FAMILY HISTORY SOCIETY

The National Burial Index

	1st Edition	2nd Edition

The National Burial Index (NBI) for England and Wales was concieved to assist family historians find burial records and in doing so, complement the International Genealogical Index (IGI), which is mainly a search aid to baptisms and marriages.  The NBI is a national archive, giving worldwide access to sources held by local repositories, family history societies and other groups participating in the project. It is now in its second edition with cumulative edition being produced at approximately three-yearly intervals.  A parallel, but not yet published, project is taking place in Scotland under the supervision of the Scottish Association for Family History Societies. The NBI for England and Wales, is not a record of nor does it contain monumental inscriptions.

Rotherham Family History Society is a major contibutor to the NBI and the Rotherham section of now contains more than 160,000 entries. All this is thanks to our team of dedicated volunteers who give up their spare time to assist with the project. The work involves the transcribing and checking of records in the archives at Rotherham and Sheffield.

The Rotherham indexes can be searched and/or purchased at the society meetings or by post from the NBI co-ordinator. Searches of the indexes are free but hard copy print outs are charged at £2.00 per surname (£4.00 for non-members) for five A4 sheets (typically there are 16 entries per sheet). This service is also available by mail (add £1.00) or Email (add 50p) from  Reg Charlesworth Email : nbi"@"rotherhamfhs.co.uk

Most of these entries are available for sale on disc, see Burial Indexes

The following burial locations are included in the Rotherham Index

The British Genealogical Record Users Committee first proposed a National Burial Index in 1994 but the Federation of Family History Societies (FFHS) undertook the actual conduct of the project. Burial records were transcribed and computerised mainly by family history societies although a few individuals contributed records. These records came from different types of sources, for example, parish registers, bishops' transcripts, earlier transcripts or printed registers. Data collection progressed by the use of a computer program (Shroud) which was designed for the project, or by contributing records from other databases converted into NBI format. Both methods involved each society appointing a co-ordinator who recruited voluntary inputters and checkers, and maintained a Society database. Co-ordinators dispatched their records to a central computer for further checking and syntactical validation, with the aim of presenting an index of uniform appearance.

FIRST EDITION

The First Edition of the NBI was launched in Spring 2001 as a set of 2 CDs. It included well over 5.4 million records from more than 4,400 parish, non-conformist and cemetery burial registers.

SECOND EDITION

As an ongoing project, further collections of records were received and over the following three years sufficient additional material was added to the indexes to make the publication of the Second Edition feasible.  As a result, a further 7.8 million records were added and the Second Edition was released in August 2004.  It is a set of 4 CDs and contains more than 13.2 million records (including the 5.4 million records from the First Edition) and covers over 8,000 burial registers.