What Is The Free BMD Project And How Is It Useful In Genealogy?

The Free BMD project stands for the Free Birth Marriages and Deaths project and is an online database that is searchable for the indexes to birth, marriage and death certificates in the UK from the start of civil registration in 1837 to the present day.

The indexes, which contain millions of entries, are being transcribed by a team of volunteers and then put into this massive database. The database is online at www.freebmd.com . You can search by surname alone, or by first name and surname and you can limit your search to particular counties or registration districts in the country.

A lot of the early records have now been completely transcribed but the more recent ones are still in progress. Those after 1901 are particularly patchy.

Free BMD is useful for genealogists who want to trace certificates belonging to their direct ancestors. Birth, marriage and death certificates all contain useful information about an individual, their address, their parents, their spouse, their birth date, etc.

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