Free UK Genealogy is pleased to introduce our new Executive Director – Pat Reynolds. We welcome her and look forward to working closely with her.

Some of you may know Pat from her previous role as Surrey's Heritage Manager, and her work at Surrey History Centre and on 'Exploring Surrey's Past' – the first website to integrate and co-present data from museums, archives, libraries and a historic environment
record. She can be contacted at pat.reynolds@freeukgen.org.uk.

Camilla von Massenbach,
Trustee

We are really pleased to announce that Richard Light will be joining the Board of Trustees for Free UK Genealogy. We have been seeking to increase the number of Trustees in order to develop the range of skills and experience that manage the organisation. We feel that Richard will complement the other Trustees.

Richard brings with him many years of experience working within the fields of management consultancy and software development particularly in the area of managing historical collections. He is interested in how he can support us to better link the datasets that we have together and achieve the maximum value from the work that our volunteers have contributed.

As a Board of Trustees we look forward to working with Richard and using his experience to ensure that Free UK Genealogy is sustainable over the coming years.

Camilla Gemmingen von Massenbach
(Chair of Trustees)

As part of our work to overhaul all of the Free UK Genealogy websites we're very pleased to announce that we are able to give people access to our new version of FreeREG.

This has been the culmination of a great deal of work by volunteers across the organisation with valuable input from the FreeREG community. The new system currently holds all of the information that sits within FreeREG but from now on will be updated on a daily basis with all of the work from FreeREG transcribers.

This is an early stage of our redevelopment which might mean that the new system provides some answers that you are not expecting. The new system will run in parallel with FreeREG until we are confident that it is working as expected.

We'd like to offer a big thanks to everyone who has given their time and expertise to help us take FreeREG forward.

We hope the new FreeREG helps you to progress your research.

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)