My Role as Part of FreeBMD

What is FreeBMD


FreeBMD aims to provide access to the indexes of births, marriages and deaths for England, Wales and Scotland for the period from 1837 up to the 1970s. These indexes are the ones held by the General Records office held at the Family Records Centre in London.

How does the FreeBMD activity work


What is My Role

I act a coordinator for one of the syndicates transcribing indexes from scanned images of copies of the original index.

The process starts by the allocation of a block of scanned images to each syndicate. The role of the Coordinator is to allocate individual scans to the members of the syndicate, check that they are correctly completed and then uploaded to the FreeBMD website.

So far some three hundred million records have been transcribed and they are being added to at about sixtyfive thousand per day. This is a big activity involving over two thousand people from around the world.

Can you Help?

Created on 26 March 2002

Updated on 1st May 2014

Copyright © 2001-2014 B.M.Smart

If you wish to help, I would suggest the you first look at the FreeBMD website . If you would like to contribute to the task, either select a syndicate from the FreeBMD web site or go to my FreeBMD sign on page and follow the instructions. You might like to view the instructions web page that I have set up to assist transcribers. Go to my FreeBMD instructions web page .

FreeBMD is managed by a committee which organise the maintenance of the website, the database, the search facility and perhaps most important of all, the group of volunteer transcribers and their coordinators. The whole process works on a volunteer basis, including the committee, and the resultant data is free for anybody to access via the FreeBMD website

Return to my instructions page