Free Genealogy Data

Finding Free Genealogy Records

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This blog post continues from my earlier post Using FamilySearch. In this post I will introduce you to a selection of free data websites where you can find genealogical information about individual people: things like records of births marriages and deaths.

These websites focus on Great Britain and Ireland.

These resources are all categorised as Data (D) [1]. 

Records from England and Wales

General Register Office

This is the natural place to start, if only because it sits at the centre of the spider’s web: the England and Wales General Register Office (GRO). Although mainly an administrative arm of government serving other government functions, it has data for you. Its website is www.gro.gov.uk (D). The website hosts searchable indexes of birth and death (not marriage) registers for England and Wales created from the full copy registers the GRO holds. Although there are gap years, the indexes are very useful because births show the mother’s maiden name (surname at birth), and deaths show the age at death.

Searching this site is a bit clunky because you can search at most a five year window at a time.

Advice: this is the only place you should go to in order to purchase a copy certificate - other sites will sell you certificates but they are more expensive than the GRO.

FreeUKGenealogy project

Moving on, a good starting point for free UK individual data (births marriages and deaths) are the three websites under the FreeUKGenealogy umbrella (www.freeukgenealogy.org.uk): FreeBMD (for births marriages and deaths), FreeCen (for censuses), and FreeReg (for parish registers). 

Approach these sites with your eyes open - none of these websites is complete (in the sense that there are BMD/Census/Register records that exist in the real world but that do not appear on these websites). It is also important to remember that these are not original records, but are transcriptions made by people who may have misread or mistyped some words, and which may not contain details like annotations in the margin of the original records.

FreeBMD

FreeBMD can be found at www.freebmd.org.uk (D). This website contains a searchable copy of the indexes of birth, marriage, and death registers that are held by the General Register Office in London (dating from 1837 to nearly the present day, see below). They have been created by a combination of manual transcription and computer-based optical character recognition from images from the GRO. 

This website is particularly useful for marriages, partly because GRO.gov.uk does not let you search marriages, and also because you can search for a husband’s full name plus their spouse’s given name (or vice versa) at the same time.

Coverage charts are at https://www.freebmd.org.uk/progress.shtml. Births and marriages drop below 100% after 1989, and deaths after 1986.

Treat this as a finding aid.

FreeCen

FreeCen can be found at www.freecen.org.uk (D). England and Wales have held national censuses every ten years since 1841 (but none in 1941); full records can be viewed by the public up to 1921, with _some_ of those up to 1911 visible at this free site. Make sure that you check whether the census year you are interested in is online before concluding whether somebody didn’t exist (for example 1901 and 1911 for example are almost absent).

Treat this as a finding aid.

FreeReg

FreeReg can be found at www.freereg.org.uk (D). The website claims to use the 1831 county boundaries, but this isn’t completely accurate (eg Maker parish appears under Cornwall, whereas it was in Devon until 1844). This free site holds transcriptions of parish registers; these were the records of baptisms, marriages, and burials that were (and still are) kept by the church. You will need to use these for anything before mid 1837.

From experience the spellings that appear on the website do not exactly match those in the original registers.

Treat this as a finding aid.

LocalBMD

For free access to indexes created from the more accurate original registers, head on over to the Local BMD project at www.localbmd.info (D). 

Over the last few years family historians in a growing number of counties and regions across the country have been working with their local Register Office staff to create on-line indexes of births marriages, and deaths, created from the original registers (and not from the copy registers held by the GRO). There is no working centralised list of which counties and regions are online, I advise you to search for the region plus 'BMD'.

Online Parish Clerk

Online Parish Clerks (OPC) (D). These are unpaid volunteers who are willing to help others with their genealogical research, making transcriptions of parish records for their area freely available. Some areas are much better served than others. The Lancashire OPC is a stellar example - http://www.lan-opc.org.uk/. There is a list of (some of the) OPCs available at UKBMD - https://www.ukbmd.org.uk/online_parish_clerk.

Rootsweb

Rootsweb (DTC). This portal site is funded and supported by Ancestry.com. It contains lots of individual people’s family trees that they have uploaded. Some of these trees are well researched and list their sources; others are not and don’t.

FamilySearch

Of course, there is also Family Search, which is at www.familysearch.org (DTRS). This is covered in my earlier blog post Using FamilySearch.

Probate Registry

The England and Wales Probate Registry website is at probatesearch.service.gov.uk (D). This website holds a searchable index of all probate records held after 1858, with images of the pages of the register books. These give date and location of death, address, and the names of executors.

Update 2022 - the computer software used by the website has recently been rewritten and currently is not at its best. 

Public Library

Your local library (DT). This is a little appreciated resource - using a computer inside the library gives you free access to Ancestry and FindMyPast records that you would otherwise have to pay for.

Archive

Next, the original archive itself (D). This could be your county archive, or somewhere like The National Archives (TNA). These are free to visit and view their records. TNA is free to photograph them too. BUT, and it’s a big but, you will need to learn how to navigate the archive's catalog (each archive's catalog is mostly online) AND order in advance. Every archive is different. These are for people who know what document they are looking for and how to find it in the catalog, and are often the only way to check whether a transcription was correct. In my case I was able to prove that my ancestor John Bunn who was born in Harwich in 1810 was the same John Bunn who was baptised in Norwich in 1822, because it was written in the margin of the baptism register but was not transcribed.

Google

And, of course, Google (DR). Don’t underestimate how much a Google search can help. Don't treat what you find here as automatically true, treat it instead as hints leading you in directions you would not previously have looked. In my case it led me to a biography of an 18th century traveller which helped reveal what had happened to my 5g grandfather.

Records from Ireland

A lot of people in the UK (and elsewhere) have some Irish heritage, and there is a good amount of accurate genealogical information that the Irish Government has made available online for free. Sadly some original records were destroyed by the Great Fire at the Public Records Office in Dublin in 1922, so expect to find gaps (absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, again).

Government records website

Irishgenealogy.ie (D) holds searchable civil registrations (from 1864, with non-Catholic marriages from 1845) with most being available as a free digital image. It also holds Church of Ireland baptism, marriage, and burial records for Dublin and County Carlow (which is convenient for me, my family came from Carlow and Dublin). Irish civil registration records are very informative, and you can see an image of the whole register page unlike with England & Wales certificates.

Catholic Parish Registers

Catholic Parish Registers, in the form of browsable images, can be found on the National Library of Ireland website at https://registers.nli.ie (D), but remember this archive uses the names of the RC parishes which are different from the Civil Parishes.

Census

Census.nationalarchives.ie (D) holds searchable images of the 1901 and 1911 censuses, which cover both today’s ROI and NI. Those from before 1901 were almost completely destroyed.

Probate

A searchable database of Ireland Probate records is at willcalendars.nationalarchives.ie (D). This is a searchable index of all probate records held after 1858, with images of the pages of the register books. These give date and location of death, address, and the names of executors.

Census substitutes

Tithe Applotments

The Tithe Applotment Books were compiled between 1823 and 1837 in order to determine how much occupiers of agricultural land should pay the Church of Ireland by way of tithes. These records give only the name of the head of household, and do not cover urban areas. Images of the books can be found (and searched) at titheapplotmentbooks.nationalarchives.ie (D).

Griffith's Valuation

Another important source that substitutes for missing censuses is the Griffith’s Valuations of 1847-1864, which give the names of tenants of both rural and urban property and their immediate landlords along with their addresses. A searchable database with images of the original documents is at www.askaboutireland.ie/griffith-valuation/index.xml (D). The site also has images of the original maps with the properties each marked and labelled to cross reference back to the valuation documents.

Northern Ireland

The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) holds records for the post-1922 period, and its website is https://www.nidirect.gov.uk/campaigns/public-record-office-northern-ireland-proni (D). This has Probate records (sometimes with images of the register book) among other things. 

The General Register Office NI (GRONI) holds civil registration records, and you can search them for free at https://www.nidirect.gov.uk/services/go-groni-online (D). You will need to pay to see the full records.

Records from Scotland

Unfortunately, although searching the database is free, images of Scottish records scotlandspeople.gov.uk (D) are Pay As You Go. But well worth the cost (typically £1.50) because they are very informative.

Portal sites

ukbmd

UkBMD.org.uk (DR) provides 2795 links to websites that provide online transcriptions of vital records and censuses. This is too much to quickly summarise here. Your best bet is to go and have a look. Don't forget that not everything they list is free.

What's on offer from the paid websites?

The big three subscription genealogy sites www.ancestry.co.uk (DTS), www.findmypast.co.uk (DT), and www.myheritage.com (DT) all offer some form of free service, but you can do very little with these services other than see that records exist about the person you are researching; you will need to upgrade (£) to see the content of those records.

Summary

As you can see by now, there is a lot of free genealogy data to be found on the internet. Treat it with respect: although the volunteers who created this content did their best, the original sources can be in a poor condition, and not all the sites tell you what is included and what has been left out.

If you can, try to see the original source, or at least an image of it, in an archive.

Do you know of a free genealogy data website that you think should be added here? Drop us a line at info@tree-sleuths.co.uk, or fill in our contact form. 

Happy Tree Sleuthing!

Julian Luttrell

The Tree Sleuths, 2022. The Tree Sleuths website.

[1] DTRS

I use four categories to classify each website:

D stands for Data - these websites give you dates and places of individual people’s events like births and deaths.

T stands for family Tree - these websites give you a place to store your family tree, share it with others, and see others’ family trees.

R stands for Reference information - these websites give you background and contextual information about the places and people you are researching.

S stands for Social - these websites provide social media and ways to meet and interact with other family tree researchers, both amateur and professional.