As a small organisation, we have to focus on transcribing, and so are not able to undertake research. However, we do provide all of our transcribed records for free, so you can search them. All our data is on our websites – www.freebmd.org.uk, www.freecen.org.uk and www.freereg.org.uk.

If you can’t find the information, you can check current coverage on each website, as they are not complete yet (we have thousands of volunteers, working hard to get more information there). We recommend www.genuki.org.uk for other resources.

Each of our projects has a Facebook group where our volunteers and researchers who use our websites may be able to offer more help. Feel free to join them & post your query there!

FreeBMD – https://www.facebook.com/groups/453018500242/

FreeCEN – https://www.facebook.com/groups/FreeUKGEN.FreeCEN/

FreeREG – https://www.facebook.com/groups/FreeUKGEN.FreeREG/

If you are in the UK you can often get high-quality help and advice on your family history at your local library if they have a Local/Family History officer, and they may be able to put you in touch with any Family History Societies that could help.

If you’re looking for guidance on finding birth parents, you may find this link useful: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/adoptions/ and also www.genuki.org.uk for family history research help.

Unfortunately, we cannot give recommendations, but there are many professional genealogists in the database of the Register of Qualified Genealogists.

The records on our websites are a result of the contribution of volunteers and are not complete. It’s important that you check the coverage of transcriptions so that you don’t waste your time looking for records that we don’t hold yet. Our volunteers are working hard to complete transcriptions, but we are always looking for more people to help; if you can support our efforts by helping out with this, or spreading the word about what we do, it could really help us get more records out there for free.

If you would like to help us increase our searchable data by becoming a transcriber for Free UK Genealogy, you can find out how on this page of our website:

https://www.freeukgenealogy.org.uk/about/volunteer/transcriber-volunteering-opportunities/

The help pages on our websites are full of tips and tricks to get the most from each search engine

• FreeBMD Help
• FreeREG Help
• FreeCEN Help

Each of help pages on our websites has information on getting the most out of the search engine. If you find that we should have a record but do not, please contact the volunteers via the website in question.

NB: FreeBMD: Prior to 1875, the registration of an event in England and Wales was not enforced and therefore some were missed. In addition, some events may have taken place outside of England and Wales. An important factor to remember when searching is that there could be some variations in the spelling of names.

We are completely free! You have not subscribed to anything on our website that you can be charged for. It is possible that you have clicked on an advertisement on one of our projects that has taken you to another website, where you might have subscribed. If this is the case, I recommend that you check your emails for a subscription confirmation to find out which site that is. Please help us prevent this happening again by telling us what pages you visited before you saw the free trial message.

• FreeBMD holds the GRO index records of births, marriages and deaths for England & Wales (Scotland’s People hold the Scottish equivalent)
• FreeREG holds parish and non-conformist register records, including Scotland. If you visit  https://www.freereg.org.uk/freereg_contents/new?locale=en and scroll down to Scotland, you can see what places have transcriptions by county.
• FreeCEN holds lots of Scottish census records. You can also search by Scotland as birthplace. See what we have transcribed for each year on this page https://www.freecen.org.uk/freecen_coverage?locale=en 

FreeREG and FreeCEN are in the process of transcribing Scottish records, you can check coverage on each of their websites. One of the issues with FreeREG that hinders transcription, is the lack of available sources for our volunteers to transcribe. We are about to begin a big push to identify new sources of records, and this will include churches and other places of entry to a religious community, marriage and burial in Scotland. 

We are also working with the National Records of Scotland (the equivalent of the GRO) on getting our policies in place so that we can begin transcribing Scottish births, marriages and deaths, in the not-very-distant future.

If you would like to help us increase our Scottish dataset by becoming a transcriber for Free UK Genealogy, you can find out how on this page of our website:

https://www.freeukgenealogy.org.uk/about/volunteer/transcriber-volunteering-opportunities/

Our original agreement to transcribe BMD data was with the GRO, who hold only the information for England and Wales. However, we hope to be able to share data from Ireland in the future..

In our other projects, FreeREG holds many Irish records, and FreeCEN can be searched with places of birth in Ireland and further afield.

You might find this post by our Executive Director regarding Northern Ireland useful: https://www.freeukgenealogy.org.uk/news/2018/01/05/nothing-from-northern-ireland/

If you do wish to join us as a transcriber, you can do so by visiting this page: https://www.freeukgenealogy.org.uk/about/volunteer/transcriber-volunteering-opportunities/

Our websites only hold records for the UK but we are working on providing you with the registration of British Citizens overseas on FreeREG.

If you are looking for records in another country, we recommend that you contact their equivalent of the General Register Office or their central archive who will be able to help you further. FamilySearch has a helpful wiki detailing what is available and where for many places: https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/Main_Page