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Family Tree Magazine Podcast
FreeBMD: Exploring Countless English and Welsh Vital Records with Andrew Koch
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This episode is brought to you by VoiceGift. What if your family tree could speak? VoiceGift helps preserve the voices and stories that define your family so they're never lost to time. Record memories from parents and grandparents and link them to photos, albums and heirlooms. Inspired by museum audio guides and designed to last, VoiceGift Play is an audio time capsule for generations. Find your voice@www.voice.gift. that's www.voice gift. If you're hearing my voice and have English or Welsh ancestry, you're in luck. And not just because you already speak the language that the records of your ancestors were kept in the UK Government first began keeping records of births, marriages and deaths in 1837, and many of them sur today. I'm Andrew Cook, editor of Family Tree Magazine. This is the show from America's Number one genealogy magazine, and on this episode of our Best Website series, we'll discuss Free BMD, an online index of nearly 300 million UK births, marriages and deaths. The site received a refresh in 2025 and better yet, is totally free to use. But before we get into Free BMD specifically, let's go over a little history of civil registration in the uk. Unlike in the United States, where vital records are left to individual states and they were kept at different times in different places, the United Kingdom keeps its vital records at the national level. Since a law passed by Parliament in 1837, births, marriages and deaths of all British subjects have been required to be recorded, first in England and Wales in July 1837, then in Ireland, Scotland and overseas provinces in the British Empire at later dates. Some early events may have gone unrecorded. There weren't punishments for non compliance until 1875, but the record set is remarkably complete, especially when you consider the relatively late adoption of vital record keeping in the United States, each birth, marriage or death generated a certificate that served as the official document of the event. The General Records Office, or gro, is the government agency involved in creating and preserving these records, and in addition to maintaining the actual records themselves, they also compile reference indexes every quarter of every year. Those civil indexes are hosted online, even by the gro, but that database only includes births and deaths, not marriages, and it only goes through certain dates and has limited search capabilities. That makes FreeBMD a more attractive and accessible option for searching these civil indexes. The site was founded in 1998 to make civil registration indexes more accessible. Volunteers have been transcribing the index ever since. As of this recording, volunteers have completed Civil Index entries up through the 1980s and are part of the way through the 1990s, according to developers. The 2025 facelift includes auto Suggest and Search fields, the ability to search all of England and Wales at once and customize search forms for each record type and if you have spent much time on the old site, I think you would agree that it is due for an update. The search results in the index are also easier to sort and copy, download and share as you're working through them. Before that 1837 act of Parliament Anglican parish registers were the de facto source of vital information and those dated back for nearly 300 years to the times of King Henry VIII. The charity behind Free MD called Free UK Genealogy has a related site for those separate religious records called freereg as in register, so Free Reg. They also have a separate site for UK censuses called Free Sen, Free C E N We're trying something a little different in this episode of the Best Website series. Instead of interviewing somebody associated with the website, I'm going to walk you through the site and point out some key features. If you're listening to the audio only version of this episode, you might head over to our YouTube channel to see Click through. We'll start at the new version of the site's homepage, which you can access@freebmd2.org UK there you'll see a search form that looks similar to the ones that you'll see at a FamilySearch and Ancestry.com or MyHeritage, and search fields there include First Name and Surname, county, registration district and record type. You can also limit your search to a specific range of quarters and years. Like I said, the GRO creates these quarterly indexes that's useful if you already have a sense for when the event occurred. The options here reflect the last month of each quarter, so March 1838 or Mar 1838 covers January, February and March of that year, June for April, May and June of that year, and so on. You can also limit your search to volume and page number, though you probably don't have those details yet. I have the option of selecting Exact Match for first name that will limit my results to index entries that match that spelling exactly or very closely. For surnames, I have something called a phonetic search option that actually broadens my search results to include similar sounding surnames. Useful if you don't know how a surname was spelled or if it was spelled inconsistently. If you're unsure of spelling, you can also use wildcard characters here, which we talked about in our February 1 episode. And those wildcard characters are an asterisk that can stand in for zero or more characters and a question mark that can stand in for just a single character. I went ahead and ran a test search for a certain Winston Churchill. Maybe you've heard of him. And typing in just his name. My search brings up nearly 130 results. By default they're sorted by registration date, but you can click a column header to sort it by one of the other fields. The columns represent matching names, record type, registration date again in terms of quarter by year and registration district. That is what smaller municipality actually created the the record. Later records may also have mother's maiden name or a spouse's surname, age at death or date of birth. If you're not satisfied with your results, you can change terms by clicking Revise Search at the top of the page. That's a little bit misleading because it actually takes you back to the original search page to do a new search. Unfortunately, you can't filter your results from the results page. The with quotes, Winston Churchill was born in 1874. So I'll go ahead and click on that entry which came up first. And on the detail page there isn't actually a whole lot of new information that wasn't in the entry on the search results page, but it does provide you with links to download images of the relevant record pages. Unfortunately though, as of this recording, the image links don't seem to work. But you can still hop over to the old version of FreeBMD, run a search there. And I found that the links to download those images are still live. If you scroll down on that individual index entry page, you'll see postums, if there are any. And these are notes left behind by volunteers as a way of kind of communicating with each other. The ones on Winston Churchill's page are a dialogue between users about if this is in fact that Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. So if you do find a matching ancestor in the FreeBMD index, what can you do with that information? After all, indexes are secondary sources. They only indicate that an event was recorded somewhere else. The details that you find here can be used to order original certificates from the grl. And at the bottom of each index entry page there's a link to where you can order the records online. Each record costs 12 and a half British pounds. That's about $17 US. You'll need a free verified online account at the GRO's website to place an online order. And the GRO recommends that you provide the index reference number for faster and more accurate requests. That number is not directly given on the free BMD index page, but it's sort of a template made up of first the quarter and year of the event, the volume number, and then the page number. In Winston's case, that would be December 1874 3A 695. You can also contact the local register office where the event took place, but that may take longer and of course you'll need to track down the contact info for that specific office. The jurisdiction may have changed from the time that your ancestor lived in a particular place. As a reminder, the index covers only England and Wales, the two countries under the GRO's purview. There's a separate process for finding and requesting civil records from other areas that were or are still under the control of the UK government, so the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and Scotland thanks for joining me in this month's episode of the Family Tree Magazine podcast. You can find the show notes from this episode and all episodes@familytreemagazine.com podcasts while on our website. You can also sign up for our free email newsletter where you'll receive free genealogy resources each weekday, including links to new podcast episodes as they're released. Until next time, have fun climbing your Family Tree.