Fully Indexed BMDs - Births coming soon

As you may or may not know, 7 years ago findmypast was the first company in the world to put the England & Wales Birth, Marriage and Death records online. Astonishingly helpful as these records are in their current format, they can be hard to search as they are page-indexed rather than name-indexed, meaning that to find your ancestors, you have to check through pages of records and see if your ancestor is somewhere on the image.

But not for much longer. 2 years ago, we kicked off a project to digitise these records again from scratch and we are now close to releasing the first set of records - Births 1837-2006. Marriages and Deaths will follow later in the year. The project has been a huge investment, as it meant rescanning 170 years of records and then transcribing the quarter of a billion names within them. Over a thousand people have worked on the project to date. However, we hope that you’ll find the wait has been worth it.

Here’s what you will get:

• Completely new, high quality images of all the index pages
• The ability to search for a name and get straight to your ancestor, rather than trawling index pages
• A *complete* 1837-2006 set of records (you may find that there are gaps in some of our competitors’ versions…)
• Smart search features including name variants, and highlighting of unnamed children (very common in the Victorian period)
• Clever search results to get around the quirks of the records, including the GRO’s habit of initialising second names
• The ability to search by mother’s and father’s name at the same time to help find those elusive births

The Birth records will be the first release from this project and will be available in July - and our initial tests on record accuracy are extremely promising. Keep your eyes peeled for Marriages and Deaths, and also more new search features, and more BMD records being included within this project. Our aim remains not only to give you the most complete and accurate resources available, but also make them easier to search - we hope this major record release is a major step in that direction!

2 Responses to “Fully Indexed BMDs - Births coming soon”

1. CELIA MORGAN LISANBY says:

   17 August 2010 at 1:30 pm

   LOOKING FOR MY FAMILY MORGAN — WYATT

   Reply
2. Dee Jiles says:

   27 September 2010 at 2:10 am

   I know you are always looking for new and different projects. I wonder if you would consider one which examines how/when/why family names evolved - or were changed outright. For instance, my family is JILES. I have heard it was changed from the French JULES. Was it ever related to GILES? If so, which name is the original? When did it change? Thank you so much for your consideration.

   Reply