Having such a rare surname was the reason for my initial interest in genealogy. Back in 2000, I was asked to help place online some indexes to Cheshire Central Register Office’s marriage and after combining these indexes with those from Cheshire West, the Cheshire BMD website was born. As the HARTAS surname is from North Yorkshire, I wanted to start a Yorkshire BMD website. Other counties also wanted to place their indexes online and so a fledgling Local BMD Project was born. 22 years later, work still continues with me producing the data processing and website software.
