Good news for those who want to share their family history discoveries online. The GRO has permitted users of FreeBMD to take screenshots of entries and share them online.

FreeBMD is one of a suite of free to use, forever, family history database - users are already free to share screenshots of FreeCEN (nineteenth-century censuses) and FreeREG (registers of baptism, marriage and burial from the Church of England and other bodies).

Pat Reynolds, Executive Director of Free UK Genealogy said “Personally, I love being able to share family history discoveries with my family on social media - I’m delighted I can now do this for the civil registration data we hold on FreeBMD”.
Free UK Genealogy is a registered charity,  where thousands of volunteers - transcribers, developers and others -  make historic documents freely accessible to all on its websites www.freebmd.org.uk, www.freecen.org.uk, and www.freereg.org.uk.

In the summer of 2016, Free UK Genealogy began a journey to make all of our websites accessible to a minimum AA standard of W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1. People may struggle to access our services due to advancing age, long-term health issues, and/or disability, which can often make access difficult or impossible. We're committed to removing all barriers to access of family history information and so we arranged for our most newly-developed website at the time, FreeREG, to undergo accessibility testing at The Shaw Trust (you can read about that here, in our News article)

A few weeks later, we received the report which told us what we already knew: users with accessibility issues found it difficult or impossible to use our websites, even with assistive technologies. So we set to work to make the improvements required, with the vast majority of it being done by our volunteers. 

One of the biggest jobs to come out of the audit was the insufficient colour contrast. The report stated:

The new Free UK Genealogy logos

It’s taken us longer than we would have liked, but we recently released the new colours on FreeREG and FreeCEN, and the new FreeBMD website (FreeBMD2) will also be part of this new suite. Alongside the design colours changing we’ve also made the font heavier, as the text being to light and difficult to read was a complaint we frequently heard from our users. We hope that these advances provide genealogists using our websites with a more enjoyable research experience!

Visit FreeCEN and FreeREG now, to see these improvements and let us know what you think via the Contact Us link in the footer.

The new FreeCEN website went live in July 2017 and has recently undergone an accessibility-driven aesthetic revamp. The release of the new colour suite across FreeCEN (pictured below), FreeREG, and the new FreeBMD website (FreeBMD2) currently in development represents many months of hard work and dedication applied by the Free UK Genealogy Volunteer Development Team. However, since we unveiled what was initially known as FreeCEN2, we've been making improvements and adding new features to enhance researchers' experience. 

FreeCEN's new colours and darker, more visible text

What's been improved so far?

We knew what we needed to improve because users of the new website were invited to give us feedback via a survey. Hundreds of responses came in, with many of you asking for certain features that you find useful in the original FreeCEN website as well as helping us identify bugs that we were then able to fix, including table layout issues and ads obscuring page text.

Other work (including changes required for GDPR and development of the new FreeBMD website - FreeBMD2) has affected our capacity to be able to develop many of the the search features you asked for on FreeCEN2. We're now able to turn our attention to these improvements, and in the last few weeks we've addressed another major accessibility issue you told us about: the formerly light, spindly text on our 2nd generation search websites is now a heavier weight. This website (www.freeukgenealogy.org.uk) is yet to undergo this font change, and you can see the contrast below.

Comparison of new darker text and former 'light' text.

Users often request that we make it possible for them to be able to easily differentiate between the rows in the list of search results, and see which records they've viewed out of the list. This has been recently achieved, by numbering each record/row and the word 'Seen'  being displayed below records viewed when the 'Back to Results' button is used in that session (this disappears when the search is performed again or a new search is done).

Example of numbered rows and 'Seen' on viewed records

What features are in the pipeline?

We're now making the search features a priority on FreeCEN, and plan to add the ability to:

• search by address
• search all of a country
• search without inputting county
• search by area/'place'
• search by folio, page etc
• search by occupation
• search multiple census years
• free text place name search

We know many of you will be disappointed that improvements to the searches related to place are quite limited. This has turned out to be a set of very complex problems - caused by the changing names and boundaries of the Registration Districts, the fact that Registration Districts sometimes cross county boundaries, the changing definition of places such as "London" over the last 250 years, and the variants of the way places were spelled. While we work out solutions, you will be able to use a free text place name search which will help.