Free Genealogy Websites UK: What Is Really Free
You can build a British family tree back to the early nineteenth century without paying a subscription. The free core is FreeBMD for the civil registration indexes of England and Wales, the GRO online indexes (free with an account), FreeCEN for census transcriptions, FreeREG for parish registers, FamilySearch for indexes and images from around the world, and the official catalogues of The National Archives and local record offices. Wills, war graves and Welsh newspapers can also be searched free on official sites.
This guide lists what each site really covers, what is free and what needs a free account, and suggests an order of searching for a beginner. The detailed how-to for each record type is in our separate guides, linked below.
The free UK genealogy websites at a glance
Coverage and access rules were checked on each official site in September 2026. Volunteer projects grow every month, so a name missing today may be added later.
| Site | What it covers | Cost and account |
|---|---|---|
| FreeBMD | Index to births, marriages and deaths registered in England and Wales, 1837 to 1999; not every year is fully transcribed yet | Free, no account needed |
| GRO online indexes (gro.gov.uk) | Official index of births 1837 to 1934 and deaths 1837 to 1957 for England and Wales, with the mother’s maiden name and age at death added to older entries | Free to search with a free GRO account; certificates and PDFs are paid |
| FreeCEN | Transcriptions of the 1841 to 1911 censuses for parts of the UK, Ireland, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands; coverage varies by county | Free, no account needed |
| FreeREG | Transcribed baptisms, marriages and burials from parish and nonconformist registers across the UK and Ireland | Free, no account needed |
| FamilySearch | Worldwide indexes and many digitised registers, including English parish and census indexes and Polish church books | Free; a free account is needed to search historical records |
| The National Archives: Discovery | Catalogue of The National Archives and more than 2,500 UK archives; some digitised records can be downloaded | Searching is free; downloads need a free Discovery account, up to 100 documents in 30 days |
| GOV.UK probate search | Grants of probate and administration in England and Wales from 1858 | Search is free; copies of wills and grants are paid |
| CWGC Find War Dead | The 1.7 million Commonwealth service men and women who died in the two world wars, plus civilian war dead of 1939 to 1945 | Free, no account needed to search |
| Welsh Newspapers (National Library of Wales) | Over a million pages of out-of-copyright newspapers published in Wales from 1804 | Free |
| GENUKI | Reference guide to every county and many parishes in the UK and Ireland, with links to records, societies and archives | Free; holds guidance, not records |
| UKBMD | Directory of thousands of online BMD and census transcriptions, including local register office indexes | Free directory; some linked sites are paid |
Birth, marriage and death indexes: FreeBMD and the GRO
Civil registration in England and Wales began on 1 July 1837, and the indexes are the backbone of any British tree. FreeBMD is a volunteer transcription of the quarterly GRO indexes, free with no sign-in. Its own home page states that the whole period is not yet transcribed, so a missing entry does not prove an event was never registered.
The GRO’s own online indexes cover births from 1837 to 1934 and deaths from 1837 to 1957, and add details the printed indexes lack: the mother’s maiden name for births before 1911 and the age at death for the early decades of registration. Searching is free once you create a GRO account. You need a surname, a gender and a year to get results. Marriages are not in the GRO online index, so use FreeBMD for them.
Neither site gives you the certificate itself. Once you have the index reference, you order a certificate or a cheaper PDF copy from the GRO. Our guide to searching the GRO index and FreeBMD explains the search tricks, and birth, marriage and death certificates covers what each certificate shows and how to order it.
Many local register offices have also put their own indexes online. These are compiled from the original registers, so they can catch entries the national index mis-spelled. UKBMD is the easiest way to find the local index for your district.
Census and parish registers: FreeCEN, FreeREG and FamilySearch
FreeCEN and FreeREG are sister projects of FreeBMD under Free UK Genealogy. Both describe themselves as finding tools: they are transcriptions, and errors exist in both the original and the transcript. FreeCEN’s coverage is patchy by county and year, so check which places are included before concluding that a family is absent. FreeREG is strongest where volunteers have worked through a county’s registers.
FamilySearch, run by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is free, but since December 2017 you must sign in with a free account to search its historical records. It holds indexes to English census returns and a very large body of parish register indexes, and its catalogue shows filmed registers that are sometimes viewable as images.
The full census images for 1841 to 1921 are mostly on commercial sites. Our guide to UK census records and the 1939 Register sets out where each year can be seen, and parish registers in England and Wales covers baptisms, marriages and burials before and after 1837.
Official archives and catalogues you can search free
The National Archives: Discovery
Discovery is The National Archives’ catalogue. Besides Kew’s own records it describes collections in more than 2,500 archives across the UK, so it is often the quickest way to find which county record office holds a parish, school or workhouse register. Many digitised records, such as wills proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury before 1858 and the digital microfilm series, can be downloaded free as PDFs. You need a free Discovery account, and the fair use policy allows up to 100 documents in a 30-day period.
Some of the most used Kew records, including the census, are published by commercial partners. The National Archives says that some of them, such as the 1939 Register, can be viewed free of charge in its reading rooms at Kew. Our guide to The National Archives at Kew explains how to plan a visit.
Local record offices
County and city record offices hold the original parish registers, rate books, school registers and electoral registers. Their online catalogues are free to search, and some have their own free indexes. GENUKI’s county pages are a reliable starting point for finding the right office and the parishes that existed in a given place.
Probate, war graves and newspapers
The GOV.UK probate search covers England and Wales from 1858. Searching the calendar is free; a copy of a will or grant ordered online costs £16 at the time of writing (September 2026). See our guide to probate records and wills for detail.
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission database is free and searchable by name, service number, regiment and country. For service records, see UK military service records.
For newspapers, the National Library of Wales offers its digitised Welsh titles free online. Most English and Scottish historic newspapers are on the subscription-based British Newspaper Archive; our British Newspaper Archive guide covers free ways to search it.
Free access to paid sites through libraries and archives
Many UK public library services give members free use of Ancestry Library Edition, Findmypast Library Edition or both, but usually only on library computers, not from home. Which service is offered varies from one council to the next, so check your library’s digital resources page or ask at the desk before you travel. Some county record offices offer the same.
Ancestry, Findmypast, MyHeritage and TheGenealogist sometimes run free trials or free-access weekends. These can be useful for a focused burst of work, but read the terms first: most trials need card details and renew automatically unless cancelled. Plan your searches in advance using the free indexes, so the trial is spent viewing images rather than hunting for names.
A suggested search order for beginners
- Write down what you already know from family papers and relatives: full names, approximate dates, places and occupations.
- Search the GRO online indexes and FreeBMD for births, marriages and deaths. Note each index reference.
- Order the key certificates from the GRO. A marriage certificate gives both fathers’ names and occupations, which takes you back a generation.
- Find the family in the census: FreeCEN and FamilySearch first, then a library edition of Ancestry or Findmypast for the images.
- Before 1837, move to parish registers: FreeREG and FamilySearch indexes, then the record office catalogue for the originals.
- Add probate, war graves and newspapers to fill in dates of death, addresses and family events.
- Use GENUKI and Discovery whenever you need to know which archive holds what for a particular place.
Keep a note of every search, including the ones that found nothing. A negative result on a site with incomplete coverage is only a gap, and the list stops you repeating work later.
Free resources for the Polish side of the family
British records often give the first firm clue to a Polish origin. A naturalisation file, a marriage certificate or a death entry may name a town or village in Poland, and the surname may appear in several spellings across English indexes. Search FreeBMD and the GRO index with wildcard and phonetic variants: Wiśniewski is indexed without the accent as Wisniewski and is easily mis-transcribed, and some families adopted an English name altogether. Our guide to anglicised Polish surnames shows the common patterns, and naturalisation records are often the source that states the exact place of birth.
With a place in hand, three free Polish resources are the natural next step:
- Geneteka, the index database of the Polish Genealogical Society (Polskie Towarzystwo Genealogiczne), with volunteer indexes of births, marriages and deaths from many Polish parishes and civil registers. Our guide on how to search Geneteka walks through the search form.
- Szukaj w Archiwach (szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl), the portal of the Polish State Archives, where scans of many registers can be viewed free.
- FamilySearch, which holds Polish church book collections with indexes and images, for example the Roman Catholic church books of the Lublin diocese, and a catalogue of filmed Polish registers.
Polish registers are in Polish, Latin or Russian depending on the period and region, and the right parish is not always the village named in a British document. Our guide to finding a birth entry in Poland explains how to work from a place name to the correct register.