Conference 2018

Celebrating 20 Years of FreeBMD

15th September 2018

The National Archives,
Kew, TW9 4DU

FreeBMD 20th anniversary logo

The main focus was to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of FreeBMD, as well as the project coming to the end of the 'first keying' of records. 

The programme for the day can be viewed here

In the first part of the meeting, FreeUKGEN trustees Graham Hart and Alexandra Eveleigh spoke about FreeBMD: Past, Present and Future, and Crowdsourcing respectively. Part two saw  Audrey Collins of The National Archives give a presentation on the General Register Office’s (GRO) Records, and Else Churchill from the Society of Genealogists speaking on the subject of Birth, Marriage and Death: Beyond the GRO Registers.

Footage of the day can be viewed below, and also on our YouTube channel. If you prefer to listen to the videos as podcasts, you can paste the URL of the YouTube video into Podsync, a free video-to-podcast converter website. 

Part One

Graham Hart

Alexandra Eveleigh

Part Two

Audrey Collins (see more below)

Else Churchill


Audrey performed a slightly longer version of this talk at Rootstech earlier this year which include some audience questions at the end. She has kindly provided us with the handout (PDF) that accompanied that presentation.

You can also find more information Audrey's blog where she has written about searching the GRO indexes on a number of sites – including FreeBMD: http://thefamilyrecorder.blogspot.com