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!

This week it’s the turn of the actress Kim Cattrall to take part in Who Do you Think You Are?. Though the actress is best known for her roles as Americans, she was actually born in Liverpool and raised in Canada.

The family’s journey to Canada can be found on findmypast.com’s Passenger Lists. Kim is seen at three months old travelling with her sister, Cherry, and her mother Shane (listed as Gladys on official documents) in November 1956.

Kim Cattrall on the Passenger Lists

Kim’s father Dennis had travelled several months earlier in April, when Shane was pregnant, so Kim was on her way to meet her father for the first time.

Kim Cattrall's father on the Passenger Lists

Kim’s family have remained close to their Liverpudlian roots and Kim has returned many times over the years. This time Kim is on a mission to solve the mystery surrounding her maternal grandfather George Baugh.

George married Kim’s Grandmother Marion Thomas in 1928. The event can be found in findmypast.com’s birth, marriage, and death indexes.

Kim Catrall's grandfather's marriage

However, George walked out on his wife and three daughters when Shane was eight – leaving the family in poverty – and was never heard from again. The only clues Kim has are a photograph and a newspaper article from the 1980s, which mentions her grandfather’s sister.

Shane and her sisters are desperate to know what happened to their father, but will they like what they find? Is Kim’s prediction that ‘I think it’s going to end in tears’ going to be right? Watch BBC One tonight at 9pm to find out.