Federation Of Family History Societies

National Burial Index goes live at FindMyPast.com

Family history fans can now search for their ancestors online across six centuries

 

Premier UK family history website www.findmypast.com today announced that it is adding a major new acquisition to its existing online collection - data from the National Burial Index for England and Wales. Significantly, many of these new records pre-date civil registration, July 1837, and will therefore enable family history enthusiasts to delve even further back into their ancestors' pasts.

The National Burial Index is a finding aid for burials that took place in England or Wales between the years 1538 and 2005. As such, it pre-dates the centralised registration of deaths in England and Wales, which only came into effect on 1 July 1837. It will complement the Latter Day Saints' International Genealogical Index (IGI), which contains mainly baptisms and marriages.

The burial data brings together in one easy-to-search central place the disparate records from local parishes, which members of local family history societies have been compiling since 1994, under the guidance and encouragement of the Federation of Family History Societies (FFHS). It includes records from parish registers, non-conformist registers, Roman Catholic, Jewish and other registers as well as cemetery and cremation records.

The details of over 13 million burials are contained in the database. It provides the full name, date of burial, age at death, (when given in the original source), name of the county, parish and the church or chapel where the burial took place.

Thanks to the cross-database search facility at findmypast.com, you will be able to search for your ancestor by surname across all the records on the site without needing to know where in the country they came from.

These records were made available to the public by the FFHS on CD ROM and at its own pay per view website www.familyhistoryonline.net but following a landmark agreement between the Federation and findmypast.com in September this year, burial records can now be searched online alongside findmypast.com's existing collection of over 550 million records. The records at www.familyhistoryonline.net will be transferred to the findmypast.com website in phases over the next few months.

Elaine Collins, Commercial Director at findmypast.com said "We are very excited that we have been able to gather together so many local, quality records which pre-date 1837 and present them at findmypast.com. Now family history enthusiasts will be able to extend their family tree further back from the comfort of their own home - even if they live overseas. Who knows, they might find ancestors who were contemporaries of Henry VIII."

Geoff Riggs, Chairman of the Federation of Family History Societies, added: "We wanted records from our enormously successful National Burial Index to be the first set of data available under our new partnership with findmypast.com. As a result, many more researchers world-wide will now be able to benefit from the invaluable information they contain."

The NBI data records can be accessed as part of an Explorer subscription package or with pay-per-view units.