The New NSW BDM Online Index

I have been using the new NSW BDM Online Index (Lifelink) today & I have to say I miss not having the district show up in search results.  In the past it has really helped me to identify the correct parents / family group in birth searches.  I hope it comes back.

This reminded me that I had missed GeniAUS's HOA about LifeLink from 2 weeks ago so I headed over there & watched it.  There is some good discussion about the issues with the new search facility & some of the workarounds.

I do like the idea of being able to group search results by spelling variants via Family Name.

Thanks for the tip to use the old online search facility +Jill Ball.  It took a bit of searching but I have the links & I'm bookmarking them, the Births & Deaths search page & the Marriage Search page.

Just to compare the results of searches, I tried a marriage search using the same parameters in both search facilities (using the *e / e* workaround that +Jill Ball suggested for the new search facility) & there was a huge difference - there were about 40 results in the new search compared to over 350 results in the old search.  This did give me an idea though, & I tried using only * in the bride's surname field & this produced many more results.