Findmypast.co.uk launches fully indexed birth records

The following is from FindMyPast.com

FINDMYPAST.CO.UK MAKES BIRTH RECORDS EVEN EASIER TO SEARCH 

o   100 million fully indexed birth records from 1837 – 2006

o   Ronaldo Maradona and Fish Fish Fish are names found within the records

Leading UK family history website, findmypast.co.uk has today launched an easier way to find the births of English and Welsh ancestors online. The company has reindexed over 100 million birth records, as a first instalment of a completely new version of the England and Wales Birth, Marriage and Death (BMD) records on its website. Fully indexing these records involved rescanning 170 years of records and transcribing the quarter of a billion names within them. Over 1,000 people have worked on this exciting two-year project.

The fully indexed births make finding ancestors much simpler as the revamped records will provide you with a number of new benefits;

• Your search results will be in the form of a list of individual names, so you won't have to check through pages of records to find your ancestors

• You can search the complete 1837-2006 set of birth records in one go or by one or more counties at a time

• The images of the index pages are completely new and very high quality

• We've added smart search features including name variants

• There are clever search results to get around the quirks of the records, including the GRO's procedure of initialising second names, and records of children unnamed at registration (very common in the Victorian period)

• You can now search by mother's and father's name at the same time to help find those elusive births

With this new resource now available, findmypast.co.uk has uncovered some interesting facts about the births that were registered between 1837 and 2006.

·         10 babies named Fish Fish born between 1840 and 1883, bizarrely, all in Lancashire. The list includes one Fish Fish Fish born in Blackburn in 1864.

·         Just five Ringos were registered in 1964 and 1965, compared with 2,414 Georges, 36,877 Johns and 56,170 Pauls.

·         Six Dick Turpins were registered between 1854 and 1916 – a highwayman from the 1700s.

·         Four Maradonas were registered in 1986, the year of the infamous ‘Hand of God’ goal. Eight more were registered between 1999 and 2006, including two Diego Maradonas and two Ronaldo Maradonas.

·         Eight Peles were registered between 1970 and 1972, following the footballer’s 1000^th goal in 1969.

·         Eight babies have been given the forename Hercules, with a further 51 bearing it as a middle name.

Debra Chatfield, Marketing Manager at findmypast.co.uk, said, “As the first company to publish birth, marriage and death records online, findmypast.co.uk is committed to making family history research more accessible. Findmypast’s brand new birth indexes now provide an easier route into our families’ pasts than ever before.

We are currently working on reindexing the marriage and death records and once complete, findmypast.co.uk will have digitised over a quarter of a billion records. Thanks to initiatives like this, family history is more popular than ever and the amount of historical records that are now available to search and view online will help even more people to start to uncover their own family tree.”

Findmypast.co.uk was the first company in the world to put the complete Birth, Marriage and Death indexes (BMDs) for England and Wales online on 1 April 2003. Previously these were only available offline on microfiche or in registry books, at a selected number of locations. This landmark achievement was recognised in 2007, when findmypast.co.uk won the Queen’s Award for Innovation.

For more information log on to www.findmypast.co.uk