As Christmas approaches it may be of interest to reflect on the huge progress made by the volunteers transcribing for FreeBMD. Since its inception, some sixteen years ago, FreeBMD have transcribed over 309 million records and adding a further 33 thousand records a day. This has been achieved over the years by 12,000 volunteers with about 600 volunteers currently active in transcribing.

We have 28 active syndicates transcribing both handwritten and typed index pages with some of the syndicates being involved in independent double keying to improve the accuracy of the database.Some of the Syndicates are now working on year 1975 with others working on filling in missing holes in the earlier years.

Progress can be seen via the FreeBMD progress page

A big thank you to present and past transcribers.

Allan Raymond
FreeBMD Coordinator of Syndicates
(Taken from the FreeBMD mailing list)

Welcome to the Free UK Genealogy site. This site has been put together to keep people informed about the activity of the Free UK Genealogy charity and to provide an easy way to keep people updated on progress with FreeBMD, FreeREG and FreeCEN.

We will use this site to provide you with information about how the charity works, new projects we have coming up and more general information about genealogy and the issues related to improving access to family history records. We hope over the coming months to get some of our volunteers involved with producing posts for the site to talk about their experience of transcribing for all of our projects.