Ancestry.co.uk has added a fully searchable index of English and Welsh civil registration births, covering the period 1916-2005.
The FreeBMD index from 1837 onwards that’s available on Ancestry is now entitled “England & Wales, FreeBMD Birth Index, 1837-1915″, and now goes no further than 1915. This new index is marked “free index” in Ancestry’s list of recent database additions, so presumably you have to be an Ancestry subscriber to search the 1916-2005 index.
You can search by mother’s maiden name (as that was indexed from 1911 onwards), and you don’t have to specify either the forename or surname of the person you’re looking for, so this is a powerful search facility.
This is a very good addition to Ancestry’s BMD indexes, and I’m looking forward to the arrival of fully searchable marriage and death indexes covering the same period.
Alan
