England & Wales family tree: where to find the records

In the tin box on top of the wardrobe lies a folded certificate: a marriage in 1922, a church in Lancashire, a groom whose father was a coal miner. You have never heard his name before. Without knowing it, you are holding the beginning of a family tree. This article tells you where to look next, and what of it is free in England and Wales.

The short answer

Start with what you have at home and with the people still living. Then search the free index of the General Register Office (GRO) or FreeBMD, and order the certificates that matter. The censuses from 1841 to 1921 show who lived together in each household, every ten years. Before 1 July 1837, the parish registers take you back, in many places to the sixteenth century.

Step 1: start at home

The best sources are often in the house: birth, marriage and death certificates, the family Bible, funeral orders of service, letters, army papers, photos with something written on the back. Ask the people who still remember. For each person, note what you know for certain: full name, date and place of birth, marriage, death. Also write down where you found it. A family tree without sources cannot be checked later.

Step 2: civil registration and the GRO

Since 1 July 1837, every birth, marriage and death in England and Wales has been registered. The General Register Office holds a central copy of all of them, and the local register office holds those of its own district.

Your first stop is the GRO online index (gro.gov.uk). Searching is free, but you need to create an account and log in. The index covers births from 1837 to 1934 and deaths from 1837 to 1957, plus both from 1984 up to two years ago. The birth index gives the mother's maiden name, which tells you right away whether you have the right family. The death index gives the age at death. Note that the indexes are arranged by the year and quarter in which the event was registered, not the date it happened.

What you order from the GRO	Price
Paper certificate, with GRO index reference	£12.50
Paper certificate, without index reference	£16.00
Priority certificate, with index reference	£38.50
PDF copy (births 1837 up to 100 years ago, deaths 1837 to 1957)	£8.00
Online View image, same years	£3.00

Prices for delivery in the UK, checked September 2026. A standard certificate with a reference is sent four days after you apply. A PDF arrives in your GRO account within four working days. The online image is a scan you can view, print or download for three months: for family history, it is usually all you need.

Marriages are not in the GRO online index. For those, and as a second route for births and deaths, use FreeBMD (freebmd.org.uk). Volunteers have transcribed the GRO index from 1837 onwards, more than 300 million records so far, and it is completely free, without an account.

Step 3: the census, every ten years

The censuses from 1841 to 1921 show each household on one night: who lived there, how they were related, their ages, occupations and birthplaces. The 1841 census is the sparest: ages over 15 were usually rounded down to the nearest five years, and relationships were not recorded. From 1851 onwards you get the age at last birthday and the place of birth.

• The 1931 census was destroyed by fire in 1942, and no census was taken in 1941 because of the war. Censuses stay closed for 100 years.
• The 1939 Register, taken on 29 September 1939, lists about 40 million people in England and Wales, with date of birth, marital status and occupation. Records of people born less than 100 years ago stay closed unless they are known to have died.

You can search the census for free on FamilySearch (indexes) and FreeCEN (selected transcriptions), and in The National Archives at Kew. For the scans you usually need Ancestry or Findmypast, which charge a subscription. The 1921 census is on Findmypast, the official partner. The 1939 Register is on Findmypast, Ancestry and MyHeritage, and can be viewed for free in the reading rooms at Kew.

Step 4: before 1837, the parish registers

Before civil registration, the Church of England parish recorded baptisms, marriages and burials. Parish registers began in 1538. Many of the earliest were loose sheets that did not survive, and in 1598 an order of Elizabeth I required the loose registers to be copied into parchment books, especially those from 1558 onwards. That is why many surviving registers begin in 1558 or later.

Most parish registers are now kept at the county record office for the area. Some record offices have had theirs scanned for Ancestry or Findmypast, and you can usually see them for free at the record office itself. Many registers of nonconformist chapels, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, are at The National Archives and online through BMDregisters, which is a paid service.

Free resources that go a long way

• FreeBMD: the GRO index of births, marriages and deaths, transcribed by volunteers. Free.
• FreeCEN: census transcriptions from 1841 to 1911, more than 53 million records. Not complete, so treat it as a finding aid.
• FreeREG: nearly 66 million parish register entries of baptisms, marriages and burials.
• FamilySearch: free with an account, with census indexes and many baptisms, marriages and burials.

All three Free projects are run by Free UK Genealogy, a registered charity, and by volunteers.

Other sources

• Wills: for anyone who died after 1857, you can search the probate calendar on gov.uk for free. A copy of the will or grant costs £16 (checked September 2026). A will often names children, grandchildren and in-laws.
• The National Archives at Kew publishes free research guides online, from census records to wills, and tells you for each source where it is kept.
• Your county record office holds far more than parish registers. Ask the archivists what they have for the parish of your family: they know their collections well.

A program for your tree

Gramps is free and open source. Like most family tree programs and websites, it reads and writes GEDCOM, the exchange format of family trees. If you have received or made such a file, thememorypalace.ai/gedcom shows you, for free and without an account, how many generations it contains, who the oldest ancestor is and where the gaps are. The file never leaves your device.

From records to people

A certificate tells you that your great-grandfather was a coal miner, not how he laughed. That lives in the photos, the stories, the letters someone kept. In The Memory Palace, the family tree comes in as GEDCOM and every generation gets a place beside its photos and stories, so the names become people again.