Find My Past is a leading UK-based online genealogy service owned by UK company Brightsolid. It was awarded the Queen's Award for Innovation in 2007. In October 2011 Find My Past used the new UK product placement legislation opportunites by sponsoring a genealogy TV series. The UK TV series was named 'Find My Past' and uses the Find My Past genealogical resources to discover peoples' roots.

Title Research Group

According to the account on Find My Past's website, the company originated in 1965 as a small group of professional genealogists called 'Title Research'. In 2001 they started an online project, called 1837online, which aimed to publish copies of the birth, marriage and death register pages of the General Register Office

General Register Office

The General Register Office for England and Wales is the section of the UK Identity and Passport Service responsible for the civil registration of births , adoptions, marriages, civil partnerships and deaths in England and Wales and for those same events outwith the UK if they involve a UK citizen...

 (GRO). Another online project, FreeBMD

FreeBMD

FreeBMD is a UK-based charitable organisation founded in 1998, and established as charity in 2003 to create a free transcription of the indexes to Births, Marriages and Deaths for England and Wales from 1837 to 1983.-History:...

, had already been busy since 1999, gradually transcribing the indexes using volunteers and publishing searchable indexes freely on the internet.

1837online

In April 2003 www.1837online.com went live online. This was a pay-per-view service allowing access to images of the pages of the original GRO registers. Initially there was no index of individual entries for the period before 1984, but subsequent years had already been electronically recorded by the GRO and were fully searchable. Gradually the UK Censuses

Census in the United Kingdom

Coincident full censuses have taken place in the different jurisdictions of the United Kingdom every ten years since 1801, with the exceptions of 1941 and in both Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State in 1921; simultaneous censuses were taken in the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, with...

, passenger lists and other databases were added to the site, the first being an index of the 1861 England and Wales Census

United Kingdom Census 1861

The United Kingdom Census of 1861 recorded the people residing in every household on the night of 7 April 1861, and was the third of the UK censuses to include details of household members.-See also:*Census in the United Kingdom...

 in 2005.

Findmypast

1837online renamed itself Findmypast because of its scope had spread beyond the GRO registers.. The Queen's Award for Innovation was awarded to Title Research Group Ltd in 2007, for their provision of public, online access to the birth, marriage and death records.

In 2008 (now part of Brightsolid) Findmypast gained a license to publish the 1911 England and Wales Census, which was added to the site in May. In 2011 Find My past became sponsors of the Society of Genealogists

Society of Genealogists

The Society of Genealogists is a UK-based educational charity, founded in 1911 to "promote, encourage and foster the study, science and knowledge of genealogy". The Society's Library is the largest specialist genealogical library outside North America. Membership is open to any adult who agrees to...

 in their centenary year and agreed a reciprocal arrangement where each would give access to one another's online databases.

In May 2011 Findmypast.ie was launched in the Republic of Ireland

Republic of Ireland

Ireland , described as the Republic of Ireland , is a sovereign state in Europe occupying approximately five-sixths of the island of the same name. Its capital is Dublin. Ireland, which had a population of 4.58 million in 2011, is a constitutional republic governed as a parliamentary democracy,...

, intending to make millions of Irish records available online.

Findmypast began sponsoring the UK television channel 'Yesterday' in 2010. A new TV series starting in October 2011, funded by Findmypast.co.uk, was believed to be the first example of a product placement and advertiser funded programming

Advertiser funded programming

Advertiser Funded Programming is a recent term applied to a break away from the modern model of television funding in place since the early 1960s. Since that time, programmes have normally been funded by a broadcaster and they re-couped the money through selling advertising space around the content...

deal for a factual TV series in the country.

Features

There are currently a wide variety of census, directory and historical record information available, primarily from UK sources. Find My Past claim to have 750 million searchable records but, though it is possible to search their indexes for free, a payment or subscription is required to access the full data.

External links

Findmypast Official Site

UK TV 'Find My Past'