When you search for births, marriages or deaths in the Civil Registration Index using FreeBMD, you’ll notice that each entry is registered in a district rather than simply a county. Sometimes the district name matches the county, but often it doesn’t!

This small detail can make a big difference when you’re trying to find the right certificate for your ancestor, especially if they have a common name. To help explain what registration districts are, and why they matter, we asked one of FreeBMD’s Volunteers, Jeff Coleman (a Syndicate Coordinator and FreeBMD Steering Committee Member) to guide us through everything you need to know.

What is a ‘district’?

A registration district is a geographical area responsible for recording births, marriages and deaths (BMDs). Each district has a Superintendent Registrar, who oversees registration within that area, and local registrars who record events in smaller sub-districts.

Every event is registered in the district where it actually occurred. When you order a certificate, the district name is therefore a vital clue. It appears on official certificates, in the General Register Office (GRO) indexes, and on FreeBMD.

Today, registration district boundaries in England and Wales broadly follow local authority areas such as counties, metropolitan districts or London boroughs. But when civil registration began in 1837, the story was quite different.

From Parishes to Poor Law Unions

Before 1837, England and Wales were divided into counties and parishes, which were responsible for everything from road maintenance to poor relief. Baptisms, marriages and burials were recorded in parish registers.

As industrialisation reshaped society, the old system struggled. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 grouped parishes into new administrative bodies called Poor Law Unions, which ran workhouses and collected “poor rates”.

Just a few years later, the Registration Act and the Marriage Act of 1836 introduced civil registration. When the new system came into force on 1 July 1837, each Poor Law Union became a registration district creating 619 districts in total. These were required to send returns to the newly created General Register Office (GRO), which compiled national indexes of births, marriages and deaths. These indexes are the foundation of the FreeBMD database we use today.

Workhouse, Nantwich

How Districts Have Changed Over Time

Early registration districts were often small, typically covering around 10,000 people, because registrars had to travel by horse or on foot to collect information. As transport improved, districts were merged together into larger ones, especially from the 1930s onward.

The local government reorganisation of 1974 brought a wave of renamings and mergers, with some changes continuing into the 1990s. Generally, districts are smaller than counties but larger than parishes; some are centred on towns, while others surround them (for example, Atcham almost encircles Shrewsbury).

So if you find that your ancestor’s district “moves” or disappears between censuses, it’s not your eyes playing tricks, it’s administrative history at work.

Why Districts Can Be Confusing

Over the years, registration districts have been merged, renamed, split and reorganised many times. Parishes, or even parts of parishes, could move between districts, sometimes crossing county lines in the process.

For example:

• A birth in Choppington, Northumberland, (found in a census) could have been registered in Morpeth district (1837–1936) or later Northumberland Central (1937–1974).
• Someone born in Port Isaac, Cornwall, would appear under Bodmin district, since Port Isaac was part of the parish of St Endellion, which fell within that district.

Districts have even come and gone multiple times. Cardiff, for example, existed as a registration district from 1837 until 1974 when it was replaced by South Glamorgan, and then reappeared in 1996 after local government reorganisation.

To complicate matters further, some districts officially existed but never registered any events (such as Dore, which lasted only a few months in 1837), and some parishes appear in districts centred in other counties, such as Loughor in Glamorgan which was in Llanelly district in Carmarthenshire for nearly a century.

Behind the Scenes: How Districts Are Transcribed

All FreeBMD transcriptions come directly from images of the original GRO index pages. Many of these pages handwritten or typed long before digital databases existed. 

Our transcribers work carefully from these scans, entering each district name exactly as it appears, however unusual it might look. That’s why you might spot abbreviations such as Knaresbro’ for Knaresborough, St Geo East for St George in the East, or Bethnal Gn for Bethnal Green.

Each entry also includes a volume and page number. Volumes were assigned by the GRO to group areas together (for instance, Volume 1 from 1837 included several London districts such as Bloomsbury and Marylebone, while Volume 6 included Bedfordshire districts like Bedford and Woburn). These volumes don’t always follow county boundaries but reflect how the GRO received and organised information.

After transcription, FreeBMD’s district aliasing process matches all the variants, including obsolete spellings like Aberystwith instead of Aberystwyth, to their official district names ensuring that your searches return accurate results.

Different spellings of some districts in the FreeBMD database

How FreeBMD Handles District Names

FreeBMD follows a strict “type what you see” rule when transcribing the GRO indexes. This means that if an entry says Bloomsbury, that’s what appears in the database. Behind the scenes, a process called district aliasing matches these names to their official equivalents.

For example, a death registered in “Bloomsbury” in 1846 appears on FreeBMD with a note that “Bloomsbury is an alternative name for St Giles.” This ensures your searches will still find the record, no matter which name was used at the time.

When you click a district name in your search results, FreeBMD links you to its UKBMD page, which lists the parishes it covered, the counties it spanned, and how it changed over time.

Using Districts in Your Research

Understanding districts can help narrow down searches for common surnames. For example, all those Smiths in Liverpool! If you know roughly where someone was born or died, focusing on that district can save a lot of time.

But be careful: a death might be registered in a different district if the person died in a hospital outside their home area. If you can’t find someone where you expect, look at neighbouring districts too. Sometimes you may have to look even further afield if they died whilst travelling.

When ordering a certificate from the GRO, always check the volume and page number from FreeBMD by viewing the scanned index page. This lets you verify the transcription and ensure you’re ordering the correct record. This saves you time, money, and potential frustration.

Useful Resources

To discover which district covered a particular place or how those districts changed, these resources are invaluable:

• UKBMD: lists registration districts, their dates, and the parishes they contained at different dates, with a downloadable index of place names.
• GENUKI: provides parish and county histories, often with maps and census links.
• FreeBMD District Information: explains how districts are used in searches, with links to both county and district details.

Understanding registration districts isn’t just about geography, it’s about history, too. By learning how these districts were created, changed, and recorded, you’ll gain valuable context for your ancestors’ lives and find their records with greater confidence.

Article based on contributions from Jeff Coleman, FreeBMD Syndicate Coordinator and Steering Committee Member.

When researching your family history, it’s not unusual to find an ancestor missing from a census, parish register or birth/marriage/death (BMD) index in which you know they should appear - because your other research or knowledge has already told you so. They are simply not there!

Doing a little detective work around their name will sometimes reveal them to us. For example, our own blog writer was seeking Hannah Octavia Seares in the 1891 census using a paid-for site, but could not find any trace. She resorted to a painstaking search of every ‘Hannah’ in the area, eventually finding her transcribed as ‘Hannah O’Scares’. No wonder she had been difficult to find! On viewing the very loopy handwriting on the census page, it was clear to see how the mistake had been made by the transcriber.

Hannah Seares - mis-transcribed as Hannah O'Scares - her record from 1891.

Of course, in a perfect world, all registrars, census enumerators and clergy would have written clearly. But they were only human – as are all the transcribers who work on their records, however diligent they may be. (And our volunteer transcribers at FreeBMD, FreeCEN and FreeREG pride themselves on the very high quality of their transcriptions, with every single transcription being checked by two different people.)

Therefore, we must accept that errors in BMD indexes, census and parish records are inevitable – both at source and in transcription – and so we must become proficient at detective work! But this is where FreeCEN, FreeREG and the new FreeBMD offer something unique over the other genealogy sites: our ‘Names’ feature.

How does it work?
IF you know the county and place in which your ancestor was living, you can search on all the people's names (both surnames and forenames) in a list for that BMD registration district, or for a particular census, or in the parish records.

This means you can spot unusual spellings and mis-spellings. For example, our blog writer has found her ‘Seares’ ancestors transcribed as ‘Leares’, ‘Lemes’, ‘Searer’ and ‘Searies’, in addition to ‘O’Scares’.

You can then go back to the census and search on these particular possibilities. One of them might just turn out to be yours!

FreeCEN: here’s how to do it
To demonstrate how to search ‘Names’ in FreeCEN, let’s take a simple example.  
You are looking for Ida Bailey, and you know she was living in Gloucester, Gloucestershire, in the time of the 1841 census, but you can’t find her.
1.      Go to FreeCEN, then click on the 'Records' tab on FreeCEN.
2.      In the ‘County and Places’ section, select 'Gloucestershire' as the 'County', then 'Gloucester' as the 'Place' – and then click on 'View Place Records'.
3.      In the table which subsequently appears, under the 'Actions' column, there is an option to 'View Names' in the 1841 census. Click on this, and you will be presented with all the names (Forenames and Surnames) of the people transcribed from the census for that Place.
4.     For our example, click on ‘Forenames’ and search through the names for any different or possible misspellings of ‘Ida’. Searching the forenames under the letter ‘I’, you will immediately spot ‘Ido’ - which may well be your ‘Ida’.

5.      To check, go back to the census and search on ‘Ido Bailey’ – and there she is, aged 5, living with her family in Southgate Street!

FreeREG: here’s how to do it
Using the Names feature in FreeREG is slightly different, so to demonstrate, let’s take another example and follow the steps.
We are looking for the baptism of Peter Mansbridge (son of William and Mary) who is from Portchester in Hampshire, but we have not been able to find the record.
1.      First, go to FreeREG, and then click on 'Records'.
2.      Choose your County (Hampshire) and click ‘select’.
3.      Choose your Place (Portchester) and click ‘select’.
4.      Click on ‘Names’ (just under the main menu bar).
5.     Then search the list (which appears with Surnames first, and Forenames below that). Under Forenames, we find ‘Petter’, which might just be ‘Peter’.

6.      To check, go back to FreeREG, search on ‘Petter’ in Portchester, Hampshire, and there it is – the baptism record for our Peter Mansbridge in 1809 at St Mary’s Church, with parents William and Mary.

New FreeBMD - here’s how to do it
Using the Names feature in the new FreeBMD is different again from FreeCEN and FreeREG. Let’s take another example and follow the steps.

We are looking for a birth record for Dominic B Kohlar who you know was born around April 1929 in Hackney, London, but you can't find him.

1. First go to the new FreeBMD, and click on ‘Database’.
2. Under ‘Select a county’, insert 'London' and click on ‘Find’.

3. Under ‘District’, click on 'Hackney'. (If you know the county, you can select it from the dropdown below or type it into the ‘find matching districts’ field)
4. Scroll down to the ‘Personal Names’ section on the right, and click on ‘Birth forenames’.
5. Type ‘Dom’ and then click on ‘Filter names’. (This should bring up all variants of Dominic.)
6. Click on ‘D’ and have a look through the names to see if there are any you could try searching on. For example, at the end, you see ‘Domonic B B’. Could this be your man?
7. Go back to the Search page on FreeBMD, and look for ‘Domonic B B Kohlar’ - and up comes the birth record - usefully with a mother's maiden name. You're 99% sure this is your man, so it's worth ordering the birth certificate from the General Records Office.

These are very simple examples, but you get the gist! So, if you can’t find someone in the new FreeBMD index, census or parish records, why not experiment with a search through the Names features?

Happy hunting!

We've had a few people get in touch recently asking why some of the adverts they see on our websites don't seem very relevant, and in some cases feel a bit... low quality.

The answer usually comes down to one simple choice: whether or not you accept personalised advertising via cookies.

What's the difference?

When you visit our sites, you're asked whether you're happy to accept cookies. One of the ways we use them is to allow our partners to determine which adverts you may see: in other words, whether or not you’ll receive personalised adverts. If you accept cookies, the ads you’ll see will be personalised ads, since you’ll enable advertisers to show you content based on your interests (for example, genealogy services, books, or things you've searched for elsewhere).

If you decline cookies, you’ll still see ads, but advertisers are no longer able to tailor what you see.

That second option is absolutely fine, and entirely your choice. However, it does have an unintended side effect.

Why do the ads look worse?

Advertisers try to show their ads to people who are likely to be interested. If personalisation is switched on, they can target those audiences more precisely.

If personalisation is switched off, that targeting isn't possible. As a result advertisers will show ads “blindly”, i.e. the ads that appear are often more generic, or sometimes the kind of "clickbait" content many people dislike.

So it's not that we are choosing to show poorer adverts. It's due to how the advertising ecosystem works behind the scenes.

An example of a low-quality advertisement

Why do we show ads at all?

FreeBMD, FreeCEN, FreeREG, and (soon) FreePRO are free to use and always will be. However, keeping it free for you has a cost

Advertising is our main source of income and helps us to:

• keep the websites running
• maintain and improve the data
• support our volunteers and infrastructure

Without it, we wouldn't be able to provide access to over 500 million records for free.

At the same time, we know that advertising can affect how the site feels to use. We are committed to finding the right balance between generating the income we need and providing a good experience for our users. We are actively testing and finding ways to improve how adverts are displayed, with the aim of making them less intrusive while keeping our services sustainable.

An example of a better quality advertisement

What can you do?

You are always in control of your preferences. If you are seeing adverts that feel irrelevant or poor quality, you may wish to review your cookie settings and consider allowing personalised ads. Users find this results in higher quality, more relevant advertising tailored to their interests.

If you prefer not to, that's completely fine too. We respect that choice, and we'll continue working to improve the experience as much as we can within those constraints.

We’d love your feedback

We are actively exploring ways to improve both the user experience and how advertising appears on the site. If you have thoughts, please do get in touch via the Contact form.

Since we introduced the new FreeBMD, we’ve received a great deal of thoughtful feedback. Some people have written to say how much they like the modern design and new features. Others, especially long-time users, have told us how much they prefer the original site and how worried they are about the change.

We want to begin by saying thank you. Every comment, whether positive or critical, helps us to make FreeBMD better for everyone.

“If it ain't broke…”

Many of you have told us how much you value the original FreeBMD, how reliable it has been for your research, and how much you appreciate the work of the volunteers who created and maintained it. We agree completely. The original FreeBMD has been a cornerstone of online family history research for more than twenty years, and it remains an extraordinary achievement.

We also understand why some people feel that “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.” For those who have used the site for years and know exactly how to get the results they need, it feels perfect just as it is. However, not everyone has that same experience. Many newer users, and those using phones, tablets or assistive technologies, find the old design confusing or difficult to use. What feels simple and familiar to experienced researchers can be a real challenge for others. Our aim with the new FreeBMD is to make sure that everyone, regardless of experience or ability, can access and benefit from this remarkable resource.

For that reason, we want to reassure everyone that the original FreeBMD is not going anywhere. It will stay online and fully usable for the foreseeable future, and it will continue to be updated with new data every month.

Why we are building a new site

The decision to create a new version of FreeBMD was not taken lightly. It is not about replacing something that works well, but about making sure this vital resource remains accessible and sustainable in the years to come.

Today, more people search on phones and tablets than on desktop computers. Some visitors use screen readers or other assistive tools. Others (especially new users) simply find the old site difficult to use and navigate.

The new FreeBMD has been built to meet these needs, with a modern design, improved accessibility, and new tools that make searching faster and more flexible. These features are the foundation of a longer journey to make FreeBMD easier to use and more inclusive for everyone.

A work in progress, shaped by you

We know that change takes time to get used to, and that the new FreeBMD still has room to improve. That is why we are continuing to refine it using your feedback and experience.

Our goal is simple: the new FreeBMD should work at least as well as the original, and in time it should become even better.

You can continue to use both versions side by side:

Original FreeBMD: the familiar site that continues to receive monthly data updates

New FreeBMD: the modern version that will keep improving over time

Keep sharing your thoughts

Your feedback is essential to this process. If you have found something confusing, spotted a problem, or want to suggest a feature, please tell us. Even a short comment helps us to understand how people use the site and what matters most to them. You can use the “Give us feedback” button near the bottom of every page on the new site.

Together we can make sure that FreeBMD continues to serve family historians for many years to come — a step into the future, with respect for the past.