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 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.