Now searching for your
ancestors is as easy as

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.

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.