Tim Havenith Family Tree: Web Resources: FreeBMD

FreeBMD is a website populated with Birth, Marriage, and Death records transcribed by volunteers FreeUKGenealogy project, which includes FreeCEN and FreeReg. As FreeBMD is the one that I frequently use, I'm going to concentrate on this part of the project.
and available for free to the public. It's part of the

This website is fantastic in its own right, but especially so if you don't have access to other sites such as Ancestry. BMD records between 1837-1983 are available, however the transcription is ongoing and not every record is available as yet. However, transcriptions are added regularly with November 2014 seeing 806,328 new records added increasing the amount of records to 308,090,800.

As the website is focused purely on BMD records, the site is very efficiently laid out and easy to use. The important buttons have the same font and border as the FreeBMD logo, as above, and the main button is simply entitled 'Search'. Clicking search will take you to a page that, at the time of writing, looks like the screenshot below.

To show you the functionality of the website, I'll work through an example by looking for my paternal grandmother, Rita Bottomley. Enter in as much data as you can, I've purposely only entered 4 pieces of data: record type, surname, first name, and county.

FreeBMD Search Page

As you can see there is a single result for the data I entered and I know that this is the person I'm looking for. For people with very common first and surnames, additional detail will be needed to reduce the amount of records you need to sift through.

The results show surname, first name(s), Mother's surname, district, volume and page number, as well as (in larger font size) record type, quarter, and year. Very importantly the spectacles icon means that there is an image of the record page that you can download to view (and keep with your digital records).

Result of my search

My grandmother on the GRO index page.

The process is the same for marriages and deaths and can provide a wealth of information - as well as providing the exact information you require when ordering certificates.

I want to give a massive thanks to all the volunteers that have made this site such a wonderful resource. Without this resource you'd either have to pay for access to other sites to find the information, or take a shot in the dark when ordering certificates in the hope that it's the correct person/event.

circle