Getting started

1. Interested in your family history?

This is a golden age for genealogy and there's never been a better time to start tracing your family history. The internet has made millions of records available to search from home, allowing access to family historians all around the world.

Findmypast was the first website to make the complete birth, marriage and death records for England and Wales available online, back in 2003. Since then countless other historical records have been published on the internet.

It is only possible to trace your family's passage through history due to the introduction of civil registration, in 1837, for England and Wales. From that time births, marriages and deaths have been registered centrally, and these indexes are available to search, in full, on findmypast.com.

Until civil registration it was local parishes that kept records of important events. These parish records of baptism, marriage and burial are becoming more readily available for genealogists. Findmypast, in partnership with the Federation of Family History Societies, is publishing local parish records online, helping genealogists to delve even further back in time.