BMDVerify Program

BMDVerify is a program used by volunteers on the FreeBMD project to check their transcriptions.
FreeBMD is an ongoing project, the aim of which is to transcribe the civil registration index of births, marriages and deaths for England and Wales, and to provide free Internet access to the transcribed records. Click here for more information on FreeBMD or to search the current database of over 200 million records.
If you are interested in volunteering to help with the transcribing, click here for more information.

The BMDVerify program has been written to help you carry out a final check once you have finished transcribing a scanned BMD index. It works by displaying the scanned image of the index from which you did the transcription and in a small window on top, what you have transcribed using SpeedBMD or WinBMD. Each transcribed index record is displayed in turn, just below the entry in the original scanned image so you can quickly compare the two to see that you have transcribed them correctly.

BMDVerify will not help you to work out a hard to read letter or number in the scan but it is good for spotting simple mistakes most people seem to make, such as typing "Francis" instead of "Frances", selecting Plympton as the district instead of Plymouth, reading a page number as 141 but typing it as 414 or even missing out an entry altogether. You can also use it to print out your transcription.

Since it works by displaying the scanned image of an index page, it is not really any use if you are transcribing from printed copies of the indexes that you've been sent through the post or if you have a fiche reader and are transcribing directly from fiches.

The program can be used with any of the index styles and with Births, Marriages and Deaths. The scan must be in either .TIF, .JPG or .GIF format.

The program runs under versions of Microsoft Windows from Windows 11 back to Windows 95. It does not work on non-Windows machines. More details of the program and how you can download the latest version is here.