Free UK Genealogy is proud to announce two new features to assist our users to search FreeREG and FreeCEN.
FreeCEN (with free access to high quality transcriptions of nineteenth century British censuses) and FreeREG (with high quality transcriptions of registrations of baptism, marriage and burials) now have ‘friendly’ permanent URLs to their records.
Records in FreeBMD now have permanent URLs that you can copy and paste from the “info” page.
For FreeREG and FreeCEN, the URL displayed in the address bar of a detailed search results page will always take you back to that detailed search results page. There is a snippet of information in the ‘friendly’ URL. This will enable researchers to identify which URL belongs to which person’s record.
The second new feature makes use of permanent URLs. If you want to cite a FreeCEN or FreeREG transcription in your family tree/academic work or take a note of a record of interest to return to it later, now you can do so using the Citation Generator button. This is located on the far right of the row of buttons after ‘ Next Dwelling ‘ and ‘ New Search ‘ on FreeCEN. On FreeREG you can find it next to the ‘ Export as JSON ‘ button on FreeREG. Clicking there, you get a choice of which format of citation you want to use. The generator uses the permanent URLs. This means that you can always return to the record without searching for it again.
Volunteer-led features
Our team of volunteer developers brought you these new features. The citation generator was created by Sudaraka Jayathilaka who developed this feature as an intern working with us as part of the Google Summer of Code programme. Google Summer of Code is a global programme that brings student developers into open source software development. Students work with an open source organisation on a 3 month programming project during their break from college or university. Sudaraka has written about his experience on his blog .
If you are interested in developing your programming skills, please consider volunteering with us .
