Click to visit: W W W . F R E E B M D . O R G . U K

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There are plenty of genealogy themed websites out there but I want to focus on one of my favourites for those of us based or with relatives from the UK. FreeBMD is called that because it freely supplies visitors with information of their ancestors birth, marriages and death data. It has a few points that makes the site unique compared to others out there like it.

The majority of websites only have a selection of information they will allow to be seen before you’re asked to pay. To see the original scans usually has a fee and some years are off limits to guests. Not so with FreeBMD. All the records are available for free and date back to 1837 and up to 1983. The original scans can be downloaded and it’s easy to do a search for the family member you’re looking for.

You may wonder how this can be offered for free when others cannot do the same, but there’s a simple explanation for this which has a good and bad side. Each record is manually entered by volunteers from across the world using the scans of the pages the data was originally recorded on. The good thing about this is that no one is paid so it keeps costs low enough to not charge a fee like other places would. The downside is that it’s a slow process and there are still many entries waiting to be uploaded and, of course, human error can sometimes alter records that what they were intended to be.

Overall though it’s a wonderfully ambitious project that has helped me gather more information about some of my ancestors and encouraged me to volunteer my own time to help out. I highly recommend anyone researching their family tree take a look and anyone interested in helping contribute can look on the website for more details.