Delve into our treasure trove

As part of the Explore Your Archive campaign, which begins on Saturday 14 November, Free UK Genealogy is encouraging people to take the time to visit FreeBMD, FreeREG, FreeCEN to get free public access to family history records.

The Explore Your Archive campaign is encouraging people to discover the stories, the facts, the places and the people that are at the heart of our communities. Archives across the UK and Ireland are taking part to raise awareness of the value of archives to society and the rich variety of content that is held, preserved and made available to users.

While only a small percentage of material held in archives is available online, you can take part by exploring indexes of Births Marriages and Deaths, historic Parish Registers and 19th Century Censuses, free of charge from the comfort of your own home through our websites.

To find out more about the campaign and how you can start your own adventure visit http://www.exploreyourarchive.org/ or visit www.freebmd.org.uk, www.freereg.org.uk and www.freecen.org.uk

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)