Best value in history

At findmypast.co.uk, we’re committed to offering you the best possible value when researching your family tree. That’s why we’ve just reduced the prices of our most popular subscriptions, Full and Foundation.

As an example of the significant amount of money you’ll save, our 12 month Full subscription used to cost you £129.95. With our new prices, you will now pay just £109.95.

For those of you with Explorer and 1911 census subscriptions, we hope you’ll take this opportunity to upgrade to a Full or Foundation subscription at the new reduced prices and enjoy access to more records for less money.

Remember that when you choose a Full subscription, the thousands of new records we add to findmypast.co.uk each month will automatically be included in your subscription.

As before, our existing customers will still pay even lower prices when they renew, thanks to our loyalty discount.

See our reduced prices now

Today sees the launch of findmypast Ireland, a joint venture between findmypast and Eneclann, the award-winning Irish history and heritage company. Findmypast Ireland will host the most extensive collection of Irish land records available anywhere online and will be a valuable resource for those 80 million people worldwide who claim Irish ancestry.

Findmypast Ireland, which is aimed at those of Irish descent including 13 per cent of the US population, carries the most detailed and thorough collection of Irish records ever seen in one place – over 4 million records. These include land records, directories, wills, obituaries, gravestone inscriptions and marriages.

The earliest records date back to the 13th century (wills) and include several important collections from the 18th century (The Elphin Census 1749 and the 1798 Rebellion records). The collection includes the exclusive publication of the Landed Estates Court records, a crucial resource for the mid- to late-19th century, which includes details of over 500,000 tenants on Irish estates.

Take a look at our infographic about the impact of the Irish

Start searching findmypast Ireland today for your Irish ancestors.

We have just reduced the price of memorial scrolls dramatically for PayAsYouGo credits users.

The scrolls now cost just 10 credits each to view, as opposed to 50 credits previously. The scrolls are also now included free within a Full subscription.

You can get the scrolls for the following:

• WW1 Deaths
• WW1 National Roll of Honour
• WW2 Deaths
• Waterloo Medal Roll 1815
• De Ruvigny’s Roll of Honour

Search our 1656-1994 military records collection today to view the beautiful memorial scrolls.

You can now search fully name indexed marriage records on findmypast.co.uk

We have developed what we think is the easiest and fastest marriage search anywhere online. Use MarriageFinder^TM to find your ancestors’ marriages.

How does MarriageFinder^TM work?

MarriageFinder^TM is a very clever search facility which enables you to find a marriage by searching just once, not twice. Now, not only can you perform just one search, MarriageFinder^TM will actually match up your ancestors’ records, providing you with one definite marriage match, or a list of possible matches.

When you receive a definite spouse match, we will also provide you with the volume number and page number for both spouses’ records. These are essential when ordering marriage certificates.

Search across all years

Findmypast.co.uk is the only place you can search the 1837-2005 marriage records all in one go - you now do not need to enter a quarter and date range. To be able to search all years simultaneously is a major breakthrough in marriage searching, especially in cases when the marriage occurred earlier or later than you expected it to. Our vastly improved search will save you so much time and effort.

To demonstrate how powerful the search is, we searched for ‘John Smith’ with ‘Jane Jones’ as his spouse across all counties and years. Even with these extremely common names, MarriageFinder^TM found all the potential spouse combinations.

Solve those marriage mysteries

MarriageFinder^TM also means the end of mystery marriages. If you only know one partner’s name, search for their details and MarriageFinder^TM will find all the possible matches. You can then view a record to check it is your ancestor. Alternatively, if you know the first or last name of the spouse, enter this information in your search to get an even more accurate list of spouse matches.

MarriageFinder^TM makes it highly likely you will be able to find previously elusive marriages. If you have already searched for your ancestors’ marriages without success, try searching again – we are confident we can find your missing marriages.

If you haven’t already registered on findmypast.co.uk, try our 14 day free trial. This will give you free access to our Foundation package which includes these fantastic new marriage records. Sign up today to try out our amazing new marriage search.

Search our marriage records now

To make sure we’re giving you the best possible service, we’ve developed a new subscription package which will provide the perfect basis for your research: the Foundation package.

The Foundation package will replace our Explorer subscription for new subscribers.

What does the Foundation package include?

The Foundation package will give you access to the fundamental records you need to take your family tree back to Victorian times and beyond:

• The only complete England and Wales census collection 1841-1911. Find your ancestors in the 1911 census and try our address search across all the censuses, exclusive to findmypast.co.uk
• The only complete online set of birth, marriage and death records 1837-2006 - including our fully indexed birth records. We’ll launch our fully indexed marriage records by the end of the year and the deaths will follow soon after in early 2011
• Our overseas BMD records 1761-2005 - you’ll need these records to find your ancestors who lived abroad
• BMDs at sea 1854-1890 - search these records for your ancestors’ births, marriages and deaths at sea

Find out more about all our subscription packages here.

What if I have an Explorer subscription?

Any of you out there with a current Explorer subscription will still be able to renew this subscription from 90 days before it expires. We’ll still add any new records we publish to your Explorer subscription.

Findmypast.co.uk subscription options

Have you found Scottish ancestors in your family tree? If so, then the new version of the ScotlandsPeople website could hold the key to finding out more about your Scottish roots. The site has many new exciting and advanced features - read on for more information.

Tourism Minister Jim Mather officially launched the new ScotlandsPeople site on 7 September. In addition to all of the new features listed below, there are also new Catholic records, modern indexes to 2009, and a major indexing update of all current records on the site.

• Enhanced free surname search
• One character restrictions on wildcards
• Surname no longer required field in search forms
• Refine search button
• Saved search criteria
• Fuzzy searching, name variant and metaphone options for name fields
• Direct view image viewer
• Easy reporting of transcription and image issues
• Mapping of search results and images
• Advanced searching

Why not take a look today?

ScotlandsPeople centre - doors open day

On Saturday 25 September, the ScotlandsPeople centre will have free 20 minute taster sessions, talks about the records and a fantastic opportunity to walk through the centre to see the wonderful architecture and the archivist’s garden. For more information click here.

The National Archives of Scotland will be offering tours. For more information click here.

Check out the new ScotlandsPeople site today.

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!

From 1 July 2010 we will be simplifying the pricing of our PayAsYouGo records. Currently there are over 10 different price bands for viewing records which can be quite confusing. From July we will have fewer price bands, grouped into multiples of 5 credits, for example, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30.

In most cases the changes will result in a slight increase in credit prices, in some instances there will be a reduction, and some records will stay the same (for example, 1911 census and passenger lists).

Viewing a birth, marriage or death (BMD) result will cost 5 credits instead of 1, but thanks to the full indexing of the BMDs (more information on this coming soon), overall a BMD search will cost you less, as you will need to view far fewer records to find the one you want.

This is the first time we've increased the prices of our records since we launched them, apart from the slight increase in credits to view 1841-1901 census records in April. Our PAYG credits are more flexible than our competitors' offerings. A subscription offers even more flexibility - view your options on our subscriptions page.

A full breakdown of the price change is included below.

First of all, apologies to all of of you who experienced a slow site during Saturday’s first England match: we were slightly overwhelmed by the response. But like the England team, we are now in hard training to make the second part a much more satisfying experience!

Although it’s great to hear that many of you found some nuggets during the free period, we’re working on a plan to make sure that everybody (especially our subscribers) get the normal, fast findmypast experience for the second match this Friday evening. And we’re also plotting ways to make sure that those based overseas don’t have to set their alarm clocks for strange hours to take part.

Keep an eye on this blog for more news, but if you haven’t registered yet, please do so now!