FreeREG and FreeCEN reach milestone
Two major free UK family history websites celebrated their 20th anniversary in September – and revealed their plans for the future.
Charitable incorporated organisation Free UK Genealogy marked the anniversary of FreeCEN ( freecen.org.uk) and FreeREG ( freereg.org.uk) with a conference at King’s Manor at the University of York on 28 September.
The websites provide free, searchable transcripts of key family history records. FreeREG covers Church of England and nonconformist parish registers, with over 46 million records in total. FreeCEN holds over 37 million UK census records, with just over half of total records in the 1841– 1891 censuses available.
The conference follows last year’s anniversary celebrations for Free UK Genealogy’s original website FreeBMD ( freebmd.org.uk), which covers civil registration records.
Together, the three websites constitute one of the few online resources for key UK family history records that don’t require subscription or even registration.
“It’s fabulous,” Pat Reynolds, executive director of Free UK Genealogy, told Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine. “Before this there was no easy way of accessing those records. Over the 20 years FreeCEN and FreeREG have expanded, with more and more records offering more details than the records available on FreeBMD.” The Free UK Genealogy anniversary conference featured family history workshops and talks by experts including Reynolds and Oliver Duke-Williams, senior lecturer in digital information studies at University College London.
Reynolds also revealed Free UK Genealogy’s extensive plans for the websites in the future. These include upgrading FreeBMD to “FreeBMD 2”, a website with the same coding and design as FreeREG and FreeCEN. It will allow users to generate preformatted citations, for example on the wikitree.com online family tree. In addition, she said that FreeCEN plans to release the 1901 census and is consulting with the National Records of Scotland about plans to add more Scottish records to FreeREG.
“We would particularly like to work with Scotland and Northern Ireland,” Reynolds added. “Our registration of those two countries is not as strong as it is in England and Wales.” Furthermore, she said that Free UK Genealogy has acquired some historic probate records and is investigating making them available on a fourth website within the next two years. Reynolds also emphasised that none of Free UK Genealogy’s projects would be possible without the support of its volunteers. “This is almost entirely a volunteer effort,” she said. “We welcome new volunteers doing everything from transcription to writing the code that makes our websites work.”