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!

The Knowledge Base section of our site contains our Parish Records Collection. We’ve just alphabetised the parish list so finding the one you need should now be much easier. Have a look at our parish list now.

Findmypast.co.uk is pleased to offer a collection of records to help people track down their London-based ancestors and unearth the milestone events of famous Londoners from the past. The London Collection includes records of baptisms, marriages and burials which date back to 1538. These include significant dates in the lives of famous Londoners including Charles Dickens’ marriage in Chelsea in 1836, captured in the West Middlesex Marriage Index, and William Blake’s somewhat mysterious burial in 1827 at Bunhill Fields, detailed in the City of London Burial Index.

The collection also includes the records of baptisms in London’s Docklands, some of which provide a fascinating insight into popular baby names of the 1700s, including exotic-sounding names such as ‘Hephzibah’, ‘Delight’ and ‘Philadelphia’.

The findmypast.co.uk ‘London Collection’ includes:

• City of London Burial Index – records from all the churches in the City of London from 1813 to 1890
• West Middlesex Marriage Index – detailing 84,863 marriages in 61 parishes from 1538 to 1837
• London Docklands Baptisms – comprising 407,558 baptisms for London’s docklands areas 1712 to 1933
• London and West Kent Probate Indexes – mainly detailing wills and administrations from 1750 to 1858
• The Matchworkers’ Strike – listing participants of the strike of over 700 men, women and teenage boys and girls working at the Bryant and May factory in East London in 1888, the same year as the Jack the Ripper murders

We have added a number of new features to Family Tree Explorer version 3 - here’s a quick summary for those of you using this version:

• Improved “import” support for different types of GEDCOM files. Although GEDCOM is a standard file format, files do vary very slightly depending on what software has been used to generate them: we have added support for more common types
• No limit on file size of GEDCOM to be imported
• Ability to delete an individual
• Ability to change the default/root individual
• Auto-capitalisation on most input fields
•  Faster start up when loading the application

Next on our list:

• Multiple relationship/spouse supported
• Help / User Guides