Happy researchers sometimes contact us to share the good news of their finds using Free UK Genealogy websites. Some have even found links to royalty or British aristocracy which confirm family ‘tales’ which were passed down through the generations.

Rhys Southern, who lives in Australia, got in touch recently, having made such a find, and expressed how useful FreeCEN had been for census records. He wrote: “We have been researching our family history for more than 50 years. Recently I started doing some online research with my father, and we discovered a very interesting past, with my direct ancestors being the baronets of Harewood in the UK.”

The Hoskyns Baronetcy, of Harewood in the County of Hereford, is a title in the Baronetage of England, which was created in 1676 for Bennet Hoskyns, then MP for Wendover, Hereford and Herefordshire. 

The Hoskyns Crest

Rhys asked if we would like to share his story – and we think it’s a great example of what can be discovered with good quality records and a little perseverance. As Rhys says, it might just help people who are starting their ancestry journey.

We are sharing Rhys’ story through a simple Q&A.

What inspired you and your family to begin researching your genealogy?

My father, David, and his brother John grew up hearing tales about our ancestors from their parents. These stories were fascinating, but never officially documented. Over the past 30 years, they started piecing together our family history, uncovering some connections to the Hoskyns. My own curiosity led me to join them, using both free and paid search indexes to dive deeper into our past.

David and his brother, John

What were some of the major challenges you faced in your research, especially concerning older records?

One of the biggest hurdles was navigating the accuracy of records before the 1900s. At one point, we encountered 70 individuals with the same name born in the same year and area. It became a formidable task to sift through these records and identify our actual ancestors among many potential matches.

What tools and resources proved most valuable in your genealogical research?

We used a combination of free platforms, such as Free UK Genealogy and Find A Grave, and paid platforms such as Ancestry.com, and FindMyPast. These resources were invaluable for accessing a wide range of records, from census data to vital records, helping us piece together the lives and movements of our ancestors over the decades.

How did using FreeCEN, in particular, help you in your research?

I used FreeCEN mainly to quickly confirm information (about the Hoskyns family) that we had found from less reliable sources. We found a lot of false family trees along our journey, and using FreeCEN to quickly confirm or deny other information saved a lot of time!

The search functionality is extremely user friendly and, with no registration required, it is super simple.

Baronet Hungerford Hoskyns b. 1776 on FreeCEN

Could you share more about your most significant ancestral discoveries?

As well as tracing our lineage back to the Hoskyns baronets of Harewood in the UK, among our other more notable ancestors is Clara Southern (1860-1940), a well-known artist associated with the Heidelberg School (also known as Australian Impressionism). Additionally, a distant cousin had a familial connection to Christopher Wren's granddaughter, which was a fascinating discovery.

In the early 2000s, my father contacted the publishers of Debrett’s Peerage & Baronetage* to try and get us entered into the book as descendants of the Hoskyns. For some reason, they denied his request, and that was put away in the cupboard. After re-confirming our link with the Hoskyns and gathering more evidence, I reached out to Debrett’s again, and they entered us into the book in 2023.

What personal impact has uncovering your family history had on you?

Exploring my family history has been incredibly rewarding. It has given me a profound sense of connection to my roots and a better understanding of how my ancestors lived. We've unearthed a wealth of material, including old photographs and immigration records, which has brought our family's past to life.

What advice would you offer to beginners in genealogy?

Be sceptical of the information you find, especially in family trees contributed by users. It's crucial to verify each connection with two or three sources. Marriage certificates are particularly useful, as they often list parents' names, allowing you to cross-reference these details with birth records to confirm relationships.

We’d like to thank Rhys for contacting us to share his experience. Do you have an interesting research story you’d like to share with fellow family historians? If so, please get in contact info@freeukgenealogy.org.uk

*Debrett's Peerage & Baronetage includes a short history of the family of each title holder, and has been published roughly every five years since around 1770.

As you may know, FreeBMD is our largest project with over 25,000 visitors searching the database per week. Despite being the original website from 1998 (!), family history researchers clearly value the completeness of the database and its powerful search facility.

For over a decade, Free UK Genealogy has been committed to refreshing our websites to make them more accessible to everyone in this modern age. The new FreeREG website was released in 2012 and FreeCEN followed in the summer of 2017; the enhancement of these sites offered improved readability, accessibility, and usability for all researchers.

In the course of enhancing our systems across the three projects, we are revamping the much-loved FreeBMD website!

We’re thrilled to share a teaser of the new FreeBMD search page, below. We hope you’re as excited as we are to try out the more intuitive, dynamic website; we’re sure it’ll help you take your family history research to the next level. 

The new-look FreeBMD website. Look out for some useful new features...

We expect the new FreeBMD website ("FreeBMD2") to be released for beta testing in 2025. As a volunteer-led charity, your donations and support have played a big part in helping us to reach this point. On behalf of everyone at FreeUKGEN and the wider genealogy community, thank you!

We have recently completed and filed our annual accounts (link) for Free UK Genealogy CIO, the charity that operates FreeBMD, FreeCEN and FreeREG projects. Last November, we shared the news that we had turned around our financial position after a few years of challenges. These accounts confirm the journey that we have been on, turning around a £30,000 deficit into a £43,000 surplus, and delivering the much strengthened financial position we now have:

Many people have contributed to this turnaround and we would particularly like to thank:

• Kate Streatfield, Nick Riches and William Speight, whose efforts on the Fundraising Steering Group bore fruit with the BigGive campaign last Christmas and increased donations
• Our partners at MyHeritage and Publift who have worked with us to improve the effectiveness of our advertising without degrading the user experience
• All our staff and volunteers whose ongoing efforts have helped keep costs under control.

But as we said last year, financial stability is not an end in itself: it means we can focus on supporting our websites and our volunteers and delivering our objectives – making genealogy records available –  in the best way possible. Our report also illustrates the urgency of this focus:

The continued reduction in volunteers highlights the importance of improving our transcription systems and the volunteer experience. Whilst 15 million new records is very impressive, this has continued to fall. Now that our financial position has been turned around, we also need to turnaround the decline in our volunteers and transcription rates - two key measures of how we deliver our objectives.

This was why we organised our Strategy Weekend in June, which brought together staff, volunteers and trustees to discuss our priorities. We have adopted “Quality, Value, Growth" as our focus as we look to strengthen our projects in the years to come.

We have started to appoint the additional committees we agreed at the strategy weekend, to focus on the key priorities and challenges that we are facing.

This will take time to bear fruit; however, just as we have been successful in turning around our financial position, we are confident that we can also turn around our slowing progress with our projects.

FreeCEN is undertaking a major project to improve data accuracy and consequently further improve the quality of its search results.

FreeCEN, along with other FreeUKGenealogy projects, has long been regarded by many as providing better quality transcriptions than those from commercial companies. We have a reputation for achieving a very accurate transcription of the censuses.

The new "FreeCEN2" website was launched in 2017 as an enhanced programme to replace "FreeCEN1". It records more detail from the censuses and allows transcribers to work on the 20th century censuses as well as on the 19th century returns.

We're now undertaking a major project to improve searching. This project will have several steps (some recently achieved)

• The civil parishes as recorded in FreeCEN1 and migrated into FreeCEN2 have been reconciled with the National Archive index. This has removed anomalies and mis-typed entries from our data and therefore markedly improved the results from our current FreeCEN2 searches.
• FreeCEN2 now matches Place of Birth entries with a Gazetteer that records place names along with their nineteenth century counties, their latitude and longitude, and a link to a source that supports that the place exists or existed. This Gazetteer contains England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland places together with overseas places that have been geolocated by volunteers. This Gazetteer now has over 60,000 worldwide records. Volunteers match places of birth as recorded with the place in the Gazetteer (adding new ones when necessary) and where needed record an alternative correction. Both place names are displayed in the search results.
• Our next step will be to review over 40 million records imported to FreeCEN2 from FreeCEN1. An automated system will highlight those records that need to be reviewed. Once an alternative place name has been identified it will be propagated to all similar records in the database. All places of birth that can be identified will then have been linked to the Gazetteer. This process will start in the near future.
• The geolocation of over 60,000 place names in the Gazetteer, linked to each place of birth, will allow FreeCEN to develop new searching capabilities based on latitude and longitude. That means that we will also be able to search around a particular point. It also means that we will be freed from the limitations of text searching for places of birth. A new and improved place of birth search will subsequently be able to be implemented to replace the obsolete search in FreeCEN1.

We'll then look to develop specific search capabilities - such as searching for a person among shipping returns or searching for a person by their occupation.

All of these enhancements will keep Free UK Genealogy, and FreeCEN in particular, as a sought-after alternative to commercial genealogical companies by people researching their family trees. The work by FreeCEN is mainly done by volunteers with transcribing, proofreading, coordinating, data management and system development among their roles. It is only through their support and hard work that FreeCEN has become the high-quality genealogical research tool that it is today. The improvements outlined above will serve to maintain and improve FreeCEN’s well regarded reputation.