FreeBMD's records are helping researchers at the University of Cambridge tackle one of the biggest challenges faced when trying to trace people through history: how to identify married women from one census to the next.

The aim of the ‘Geolinking Project’ is to create links between people observed in different censuses, from 1851 to 1921, making it possible to build up a picture of their lives over time. 

Once completed, it will enable researchers to better explore family histories and people's lives in the context of wider historical changes. But tracing women’s lives is particularly challenging for a number of reasons, and this is where FreeBMD comes in.
 
We spoke to Dr Alexis Litvine, project lead at the University of Cambridge, to learn more.

Dr Alexis Litvine, Geolinking Project Lead, University of Cambridge, UK.

What is your main challenge with tracing women from 1851-1921?

One of the most significant weaknesses of census linking methods to date has been their relative inability to link women between the ages of 15 and 30. This is mainly due to three factors:
 
First, women adopted their husband’s name. For us, the loss of such a crucial linking criterion is problematic to identify women across census periods since our method relied heavily on the names of the individuals.
 
Second, marriage also frequently led to a change in household for the bride and to varying degrees of migration, which reduces even further the contextual continuity between the two observations and makes linking even more complex.
 
Third, it also has a cultural dimension. Marriage reinforces an already present misreporting problem in the census, as it involves linking women using records filled out by their Head of Household (generally their father) to records written by their new husband. With this changing authorship comes an increased likelihood of misreporting their birthplace and other personal details.
 
Our solution to tackle the problem is to use the Marriage Index, as transcribed by FreeBMD, to establish additional links for women across marriage. By identifying potential husbands and wives from the same page of the index, we can then search for the woman under her maiden name in the previous census and compare details such as age and birthplace.
 
The main challenge for us lies in the structure of the source: as your readers will know, the Marriage Index does not list ‘marriage events’ but rather ‘marrying individuals’, making the identification of couples difficult. 

Individual brides and grooms are listed separately and alphabetically under their names at the time of marriage, with the year, quarter and district in which their marriage entry was registered, and the relevant volume and page number of the civil registers in which the full marriage records can be found (which, however, have not been comprehensively transcribed and made available to researchers).

(Credit: Alexis Litvine, Emma Diduch and Guillaume Proffit)

In most cases, the given page of the original register contains two marriage entries – thus four individuals and eight possible couple combinations – but this varies slightly depending on the recording practice adopted at local registry offices across the country. 

Despite these issues, most individuals can still be traced back to ‘standard’ pages containing four individuals, and around a tenth to pages containing only two individuals and thus one marriage.
 
The other challenge presented by the Marriage Index is the difference in name recording: index entries carry more official, verbose versions of names, often with (several) middle names or middle initials, whereas a census entry might have a single first name, or perhaps initials, nicknames and abbreviations. 

Given how inaccessible the actual marriage entries themselves are, the Marriage Index nonetheless constitutes the most comprehensive source that can be used to improve linking of women across marriage.

 
Did the FreeBMD data help you achieve your project’s objective?
 
Yes. The curves in the graph below show how much of the dip in successful links for younger women (the red curve) we could sort out using the Marriage Index (the green curve). This is a significant improvement.

Marriage records reduce the linkage gap for women - GeoLinking Presentation (Credit: Alexis Litvine, Emma Diduch and Guillaume Proffit)

Thanks to our links, we will be able for the first time to reconstruct individual marriage and fertility timelines over long periods on a national scale and at a very high level of spatial disaggregation. Currently, the interaction between women’s work, marriage, and fertility cannot be satisfactorily studied because we cannot observe the occupational and household status of women before marriage and during their childbearing years. 

We will now be able to identify the precise timing of marriage and dramatically improve our estimates of parity progression – the number and timing of children women have over their lifetimes – to study this phenomenon with unprecedented precision.
 
We will make all the links available to researchers, opening up many new possibilities for future projects and research questions and creating a fundamental new resource for British historians, economic historians, demographers, economists, sociologists, and many more. Our partners, genealogists, and the broader public will benefit from a much-enhanced ability to find data about their ancestors using our linked data. 

We will also develop with secondary-school teachers ready-for-classroom pedagogical resources and lesson plans using our new data to improve the teaching of history and geography.
 
All of this is made possible by the work of the volunteers who have transcribed the records that make this research possible. The work of FreeBMD volunteers is helping researchers investigate questions about people's lives that could not previously be studied at this scale.

 
Will you require more data from us in the future?
We would love to! Any transcribed marriage or death certificates would be of a huge help for us.

 
How can we learn more about the project?
Please take a look at our website: https://geolinking.hist.cam.ac.uk 
 
We are also looking for volunteers who have either done some linking themselves (either of a family or a place for the period 1851-1921). Anyone who has done this to a high quality can receive a copy of our links for the same sample so we can evaluate errors in our sample or the manually linked one.

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.

As you may know, FreeBMD is our largest project with over 25,000 visitors searching the database per week. Despite being the original website from 1998 (!), family history researchers clearly value the completeness of the database and its powerful search facility.

For over a decade, Free UK Genealogy has been committed to refreshing our websites to make them more accessible to everyone in this modern age. The new FreeREG website was released in 2012 and FreeCEN followed in the summer of 2017; the enhancement of these sites offered improved readability, accessibility, and usability for all researchers.

In the course of enhancing our systems across the three projects, we are revamping the much-loved FreeBMD website!

We’re thrilled to share a teaser of the new FreeBMD search page, below. We hope you’re as excited as we are to try out the more intuitive, dynamic website; we’re sure it’ll help you take your family history research to the next level. 

The new-look FreeBMD website. Look out for some useful new features...

We expect the new FreeBMD website ("FreeBMD2") to be released for beta testing in 2025. As a volunteer-led charity, your donations and support have played a big part in helping us to reach this point. On behalf of everyone at FreeUKGEN and the wider genealogy community, thank you!

We have been inundated with responses so have closed for this year.

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We're holding a 'Genealo-thon' on Saturday the 7th March, using our records to help break down your brick walls.

Why not get some fresh eyes on your Brick Wall Ancestor? This year for Open Data Day we're hosting a Brick Wall Challenge! Send us as much information as you have on your 'brick wall' ancestor (BWA) and the Free UK Genealogy community will try to help you push that ancestral line back a generation using our freely available Open Data.

Use the form below to tell us as much as you can about your BWA and if your application is progressed we will be in touch!

When sending us a FamilySearch tree link, please make sure the focus is on your brick wall ancestor, or other ancestor; if it is on yourself, we won't be able to view your tree.

If you'd like to be involved from the other side, to help break down the Brick Walls, this is the page for you: https://www.freeukgenealogy.org.uk/news/2020/02/14/brick-wall-team/