Free Births, Marriages, and Deaths Search - England and Wales 1837-1983
The massive task of digitizing, and making searchable, the names contained in the General Register Office (London) indexes
has been underway for a few years now. This database is made available to the end user,
courtesy of the volunteers of the FreeBMD organization. The leadership of FreeBMD has organized
the permissions and tools necessary to enable hundreds of volunteers to convert to electronic text,
and publish online, searchable indexes to the births, marriages, and deaths in England and Wales. FreeBMD has
already indexed more than 90 million names between the years of 1837 and 1983, and more names
continue to be added everyday. The search provider will add to this database as FreeBMD provides more names.
It is estimated that more than 50% of the names between 1837 and 1900 have been indexed. Because
of the nature of the index you will note that not all of the fields have been indexed all of the
time. Until 1866, most of the indexes were handwritten, making the task of conversion sometimes difficult.
