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 have already heard, we’ve tweaked our World Cup offer slightly to ensure that all of you receive the best possible service: whenever England play a match you will be able to access findmypast.co.uk for free for 90 minutes.

All you have to do is make sure you’ve registered on the site (unless you’re already registered in which case there’s no need to do so again) and choose your 90 minutes between 9am Friday 18th June and 9am Saturday 19th June (UK time).

England will play Algeria this evening at 7.30pm - it’s up to you whether you choose to take your 90 minutes of free browsing when England play!

Here’s the competition question we’d like you to answer for the second part of the competition. Search our birth records to find the answer:

How many first names was Ann Pepper, born in West Derby in the Jan/Feb/Mar quarter of 1883, given?

The prize: a digital camera, vouchers for a year’s Full subscription plus more family history prizes.

Keep your eye on the blog for a competition question to answer each time England play. For a chance to win the prize, send us your answers to all the competition questions when England get knocked out of the competition - we’ll give you details of how to enter then. Remember to make a note of your answer to each part of the competition - you’ll need to send us your answers in one bundle after England get knocked out.

You have until 12 July to send us your answers and there can only be one winner. We’ll pick the winner at random from the entries that contain all of the correct answers - the judge’s decision is final. We’ll publish the winner on our blog on 13 July along with the answers to the questions.

Good luck!

*All records available using our Full subscription (including the 1911 Census) will be free: Living Relatives searches and Memorial scrolls are not included.