You can now search 163,477 new Thames-side and Medway parish burial records on findmypast.co.uk

These burial records cover Middlesex, Essex, Surrey and Kent for the period 1702 to 1997. These records represent the next part of a collection licensed from local specialist Rob Cottrell, and follow on from the Thames-side and Medway baptism records we recently published.

We will publish marriage records shortly and occupational records of Thames watermen and lightermen will follow to complete the collection.

Find your Thames-side and Medway ancestors today in our parish burial records.

We have just published 277,834 new Thames and Medway parish baptism records on the site for the period 1721 to 1970.

These baptisms are transcriptions, not indexes, and include, among others, such key London historical periphery parishes as those in Brentford, Deptford, Ealing, Greenwich and Rotherhithe.

As well as the Thames-side parishes, the coverage extends down the estuary and the north Kent coast to the Medway towns. This release of records represents the first part of a collection licensed from local specialist Rob Cottrell.

We plan to publish burial records in August and marriage records soon after. In due course, occupational records of Thames watermen and lightermen will also go online at findmypast.co.uk

Search our parish baptisms for your Thames and Medway ancestors.

Following the launch of our fully indexed birth records last week, we’ve uncovered some interesting finds within the records:

• 10 babies named Fish Fish were born between 1840 and 1883, bizarrely, all in Lancashire. The list even includes one Fish Fish Fish born in Blackburn in 1864:

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• 340 Adolfs have been registered - with the last birth listed in the UK in 2005.
• Just five Ringos were registered in 1964 and 1965, compared with 2,414 Georges, 36,877 Johns and 56,170 Pauls.
• Six Dick Turpins were registered between 1854 and 1916 - a highwayman from the 1700s:

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• Four Maradonas were registered in 1986, the year of the infamous ‘Hand of God’ goal. Eight more were registered between 1999 and 2006, including two Diego Maradonas and two Ronaldo Maradonas.
• Eight Peles were registered between 1970 and 1972, following the footballer’s 1000th goal in 1969.
• Eight babies have been given the forename Hercules, with a further 51 bearing it as a middle name.

We also did some research into the birth patterns over the past century and found that the trend for births at certain times of the year has changed. In 1907 and 1908, the peak time of year for births was in quarter two during April, May and June, compared with 2007 and 2008 when July, August and September saw the most births. It’s possible that 21st century parents are more mindful of the school year than they were 100 years ago.

Search our fully indexed birth records today to see who you can find.

We’ve been busy this week adding over 40,000 new parish baptism and burial records to findmypast.co.uk

New City of London Burial Index records

We’ve just added 30,596 records for the Spa Fields Burial Ground from the City of London Burial Index to findmypast.co.uk

These records cover the period from March 1778 to March 1810 and takes findmypast.co.uk’s coverage of this site from 1778 up to 1849.

Search these records in our parish burial records collection.

More information about the City of London Burial Index can be found in our knowledge base.

New London docklands parish baptism records

Also this week, we’ve added 10,625 new London docklands parish baptism records to the site. The details of these records are as follows:

St Mary Stratford – 1771-1813 – 1,966 baptisms
St Mary Stratford – 1813-1831 – 1,534 baptisms
St John Wapping – 1707-1734 – 7,125 baptisms

Search our parish baptisms for your London docklands ancestors.

These records were provided by Docklands Ancestors. You can read more about the London docklands records in our knowledge base.

We’re very happy to announce that you can now search fully indexed birth records for 1837 to 2006 on findmypast.co.uk

Fully indexing the birth records involved rescanning 170 years of records and transcribing the quarter of a billion names within them. Over 1,000 people have worked on this two-year project.

These records are now the easiest to search complete birth records available anywhere online. The following are some of the benefits of the fully indexed birth records:

• Your search results will be in the form of a list of individual names, so you won’t have to check through pages of records to find your ancestors
• There is a complete 1837-2006 set of records
• The images of the index pages are completely new and very high quality
• We’ve added smart search features including name variants, and highlighting of unnamed children (very common in the Victorian period)
• There are clever search results to get around the quirks of the records, including the GRO’s procedure of initialising second names
• You can now search by mother’s and father’s name at the same time to help find those elusive births

If you haven’t had success finding an ancestor’s birth record previously, it’s definitely worth trying again using our fully indexed birth records - start searching them now.

Next on the list is a project to fully index the marriage and death records which we expect to complete by the end of the year.

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!

An amazing World Cup-themed offer is coming your way very soon…stay tuned for full details!

You can now find the complete World War I Campaign Medal Rolls for the Royal Marines on findmypast.co.uk.

The database contains the names of over 75,000 Royal Marine Officers, NCOs and other ranks, and provides a complete listing of all Royal Marines who served in WW1. Added to the transcripts of these records are service details for a large number of men, particularly those killed in action or died of wounds during WW1 and in many cases post-war deaths and WW2 deaths are noted.

The medals covered by the rolls are: the 1914 Star, the Clasp to the 1914 Star, the 1914-15 Star, the British War Medal and the Victory Medal.

Start searching for your Royal Marine ancestors today and have a look at our Royal Marine Medal Roll knowledge base page for fascinating, detailed information about these records.

We’re happy to tell you that overnight we have added a complete new set of images for the 1851 Census, which are of much higher quality than the existing ones. This is part of an ongoing programme to improve the quality of images on records across the site, beginning with the censuses. What you should notice is:

• The images will load significantly faster in both the standard and enhanced viewers
• Images have been reprocessed using newer technology, which makes them easier to read
• Images which were cropped incorrectly, in some cases making part of the original document unreadable, should be significantly rarer!

We hope these new images will make your family history research that tiny bit easier - we will keep you updated on further enhancements to the other census images as they go live on the site.

We’ve added a large collection of baptism, burial and marriage records for Wakefield and surrounding areas. Have a look at the tables below for full details:

Baptisms

Marriages

Burials