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BMD records now even easier to search

Improved England & Wales Birth Marriage and Death Indexes 1837-2005

We’re working to make it easier to find your ancestors in our Birth, Marriage & Death Index record collection. If you’re searching for births or marriages, there’s no more having to trawl through individual index pages yourself – when you carry out a search, you’ll get individual results based on your ancestor’s name. We’re still working on our Death Indexes, but we’ll let you know when we’re finished.

Make sure you’re searching in the right place

To make sure you get the right results, be sure to search the right collection. If you’re looking for births, marriages or deaths between 1837 and 1915 search the transcribed by FreeBMD collections. For dates after that, search our other collection.

Death Indexes 1837-1983

We’re still in the process of transcribing deaths between 1916 and 1983 – and these will be available as soon as we’re finished. But at the moment your search result for these years will show you the relevant index page. Once you’ve opened the image you can then scroll down and look for your ancestor’s name on the page.

How to search BMD records?

  1. Click on the collection you want to search.

  2. Enter all the search details you know. The more details, the better the results.

  3. Then you’ll get matching results.

  4. Click on the record for more information and to view the original index page.

Searchable Birth Index

The new birth index is searchable by: first and/or last name, month and/or year of registration, district and/or county, and also by mother’s maiden name. The latter is really useful because if you try searching using a known maiden name, but leaving the given names and date blank, it’s entirely possible that you might find children born to a mother who had re-married after the death of her first husband and had registered further children in her new married name.

Search Birth Marriage and Death Indexes
Enter what you know and start searching for your ancestor in our BMD collections
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Other Information

FreeBMD and Ancestry

Civil Registration of these vital events began in 1837, at the dawn of the Victorian era and has continued to this day. Birth, marriage and death certificates are public records and are available to anyone to order, but how do we find them? The answer is to use the General Register Office’s indices (known to genealogists of a certain age as "St Cath’s indexes"). Using the indices you can find an event, order the certificate and take your research back another stage.

In 1998 a charitable organization called "FreeBMD" began a volunteer-driven project to transcribe these records and make them available to all, for free, on the Internet. Previously, to find the record you wanted you had to go to a record office, library or LDS Family History Center and trawl through miles of microfilm in order to find the record you were so desperately looking for. Ancestry.com began sponsoring FreeBMD in 2001 and as the project gained momentum, more and more records have been made available to search for free - both on FreeBMD and on Ancestry.com.

The "FreeBMD Index" concentrates on 19th and early 20th century records, but the need to search later on in the 1900s to confirm the facts of any birth, marriage or death presented a problem. Although Ancestry.com (and other websites) had all of the later index images available online, they weren’t searchable by individual name. Instead the user was presented with, (depending upon how common the surname) a vast number of pages where that individual name might possibly appear. This meant the search was often time-consuming and tedious, in much the same way as a good old fashioned microfilm-trawl was.

So Ancestry.com has taken the bold step of commissioning an "every name" transcript of all GRO indexes from 1916 – 2005. Births and Marriages are already online and the index of deaths for the same period will be ready to search by the end of 2009. The transcribed Birth Index took 400,000 man-hours (that’s 187 years!) to transcribe and has added almost 62.8 million extra records to the 71 million already made available through the partnership with FreeBMD. And Ancestry.com is the only place on the Internet where they’re available all in one place and fully searchable by name.