When a large Archive and an online data site decide to work together this is GOOD news for the community worldwide. Even better when it adds another 9 million records online!!

The details of millions of people listed in a wide range of records held by the Society of Genealogists are now easier than ever to search online, thanks to a partnership with findmypast.co.uk to mark the society’s centenary.

The collection, which can be explored at www.findmypast.co.uk, includes apprentice records, certificates of marriages and deaths and wills drawn from the Bank of England. A total of 9 million entries are included among the new additions, which can be searched by details including name, age and location.

Among the new records you will find:

  • Boyd’s Marriage Index containing over 7 million names from 1538 to 1840
  • Boyd’s London Burials 1538-1872 containing 240,000 names
  • Faculty Office Marriage Licence Allegations 1701-1850
  • St Andrew’s Holborn Marriage Index 1754-1812
  • Vicar-General Marriage Licences Allegations 1694-1850
  • St Leonard Shoreditch Burials 1805-1858 and Workhouse Deaths 1820-1828, online for the first time
  • Prerogative Court of Canterbury Wills Index 1750-1800

Family historians with links to London may find the records of particular interest, with marriages taking place in St Andrew’s church in Holborn between 1754 and 1812 and a list of burials in Shoreditch between 1805 and 1858 among the updates. Researchers looking to learn more about ancestors who may have ended their lives in the area’s workhouses may also benefit from a set of death records dating from 1820 to 1828. However, other records offer a more varied scope, including seven million names featured in Boyd’s Marriage Index and the Apprentices of Great Britain collection, which includes 350,000 entries from the years between 1710 and 1774.

Although some of the data could previously be viewed online by subscribers to Origins.net, the enhanced information and images will now also be available through both findmypast.co.uk’s full subscription package and its ‘pay as you go’ credits.

Family historians will find these records to be an invaluable aid in their research, and it that wasn’t enough good news … further records are expected to be added to the site over the coming months, including images from the Bank of England Wills collection together with other datasets, such as the Trinity House Petitions Index and Teachers Registration Council Registers.

So stay tuned, and keep that FindMyPast.co.uk subscription up to date.