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💍 FamilySearch Indexes 91 Million England and Wales Marriages

FamilySearch's September update added more than 302 million records from 31 countries, and the British share is the one to notice. The England and Wales Marriage Registration Index, 1837 to 2005 gained 91,578,630 indexed entries, which makes it a free, searchable copy of the civil marriage index from the start of registration to the present century. Alongside it came 4,619,470 entries in England, Births and Christenings, 1538 to 1975, and small but useful additions to the Cheshire, Devon, Hertfordshire, Northumberland, Staffordshire and Yorkshire parish register collections, plus First World War service and Women's Army Auxiliary Corps records.

🔗 Source: FamilySearch: New Historical Records, September 2026

📜 Ancestry Opens the British Colonial Enslavement Registers, Free to All

On 22 September Ancestry published the Former British Colonies Enslavement Registers, 1813 to 1840: nearly 4 million individual records across close to 300,000 pages, digitised from the original manuscripts at The National Archives in partnership with University College London's Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery. The registers cover 20 former British dependencies in the Caribbean, Central and South America, the Indian Ocean and South Africa, and record names, ages, physical descriptions, family relationships and African origins. The collection is fully indexed and free to search with a free Ancestry account. For anyone tracing Caribbean or African diaspora ancestry, and for British families whose forebears held or worked estates, this is the most significant release of the year.

🔗 Source: Ancestry: Former British Colonies Enslavement Registers

🔥 TheGenealogist Adds 300,000 Londoners from the Parishes of the Great Fire

TheGenealogist has released more than 300,000 individuals from the registers of the London parishes destroyed or damaged in the Great Fire of 1666, spanning three centuries of baptisms, marriages and burials. The release is bundled with contemporary and historical works, including Pepys's diary and Old and New London, so the entries can be read against the streets and events the families lived through. If a City of London line goes cold in the 1600s, this is the place to look again.

🔗 Source: TheGenealogist: News

The England and Wales marriage index does not name the spouse before 1912, but it tells you who was on the same register page. Every entry carries a quarter, a registration district, a volume and a page number, and each page of a marriage register holds only two marriages. So if your ancestor's entry reads Sep 1861, Wigan district, vol. 8c, page 412, search the same quarter, district, volume and page and you will find at most three other names: the other party to your ancestor's marriage and the couple married on the same day. From 1912 the index prints the spouse's surname, which makes the pairing certain. Once you have both names, the parish register or the certificate will confirm the fathers, and that is what earns the couple a place in the sixth generation of a chart rather than a question mark.

🔗 Useful guide: GOV.UK: Research your family history

🎓 All About That Place, 7 to 16 October: Free

The Society of Genealogists' online festival returns for ten days, with almost 200 recorded ten-minute talks by more than 150 speakers, all free and all in one place in the SoG Learning Hub. Each day has a theme: Getting Started, Health and Medicine, Tools, Military and War, Work and Fun, Collections and Archives, Changing Places, Innovation, Politics and Rights, and Sharing Stories. Ten minutes is long enough to learn one thing well, and the talks stay available after the festival. The Society for One Place Studies, A Few Forgotten Women, the British Association for Local History and the Family History Federation are partners this year.

🔗 Details and access: Society of Genealogists: All About That Place

🏇 Missed the London show? The next one is online

The Family History Show at Kempton Park took place on Saturday 3 October, two days before this edition. If you could not get there, the organisers' next event is The Family History Show, Online, on Saturday 6 February 2027, 10 am to 4 pm, with the same mix of talks and society stands from your own desk. We will remind you nearer the time.

🔗 Details: The Family History Show

🕯️ Still running: In Memoriam at the Society of Genealogists

The season on death records, probate and gravemarkers that we mentioned last month began on 29 September and continues through the autumn. A good companion to the marriage index tip above: the two ends of a life are where the parents' names are written down.

🔗 Programme: Society of Genealogists: The Genealogy Gazette

🚀 The studio is open

Since 25 September you can order a six-generation circular ancestral chart in any of 72 designs: single or couple at the centre, complete or incomplete lineage, minimalist, watermarked or full colour, with the Thistle, Tudor Rose, Irish Harp, Shamrock, Celtic Knot and Daffodil motifs. You choose the design and order first; the family tree file comes afterwards, as a GEDCOM export or our simple spreadsheet, and nothing is printed until you have approved a digital proof. Framed and unframed 16-inch fine art prints are delivered to the UK, the USA and Ireland; the digital file is available worldwide. Prices start at £45 for the digital chart.

▶️ Browse the designs: The 72 designs and prices

🔍 New and free: the GEDCOM Checker

Every family tree file has errors you cannot see from the tree view: a child born before a parent, a marriage after a death, people attached to nothing, two entries for one person, a link to a record that no longer exists. Our new checker finds them. Drop in the GEDCOM export from Ancestry, MyHeritage, FamilySearch, Findmypast or your desktop program and in a few seconds you get 31 checks on dates, structure, data quality and DNA hypothesis people, a health score out of 100, and a verdict on how many of the 63 ancestor slots on a six-generation circular chart your file can fill. Each finding links to a plain-English note on the usual cause and the fix, so you can correct it in your own program, export again and watch the score climb.

The part we are proudest of is what the checker does not do: it never uploads your file. The reading happens inside your browser, and nothing about the file is stored or sent, not even anonymous statistics. A GEDCOM is full of living relatives and that is how it should be treated. The free check gives you the counts and examples; if you want every flagged person named, with record IDs, line numbers and the full surname, place and duplicate tables as a web page, a PDF and six spreadsheets, a full report is £4.99, three for £9.99, or £24.99 for a year of unlimited reports. The companion article explains how errors get into a tree file in the first place.

▶️ Try it: Free GEDCOM Checker  ·  🔗 Read: How to Check a GEDCOM File for Errors

🎨 New: the bespoke designs gallery

The six-generation chart in the shop suits most families. Bespoke is everything beyond it, and until now we could only describe it. The new samples page shows three bespoke layouts with fixed prices. The descendants with marriages chart sets six generations of ancestors around one person and, beneath the circle, a trunk that forks into each marriage, the children of that marriage and theirs, on a 16 x 20 inch sheet. The captioned family chart is the shop's chart on the same taller sheet with a heading and a paragraph in your own words beneath it: where the family came from, what the records showed, who the chart was made for. Both are £99 framed, £75 as a print and £55 as a digital file. And six new motifs join the gallery by request rather than through the builder: the Welsh Dragon, the Compass Rose, the English Oak, the Claddagh, the Maple Leaf and the Southern Cross, each on the framed 16 x 16 inch chart at £85.

The sample families on the page are invented; yours is set from your verified records in the same way, approximately 5 working days after they arrive, proofed with you before anything is printed, and dispatched 3 to 5 working days after you approve the proof. Every bespoke chart starts with an enquiry, and there is no charge until you confirm.

▶️ See the samples: Bespoke chart samples and prices

📚 New and free: the Genealogy Resources Directory

We have published a directory of 521 genealogy websites for UK, Irish and worldwide research: every county record office in England and Wales, the Scottish regional archives, the Irish county heritage centres, family history societies, free record indexes, DNA and research tools, software, blogs, podcasts and newsletters. View it as one list or by nation, filter by type and cost, and trust the links: every address was checked before publication and an automated check re-tests them all each month. As a subscriber you also get the whole directory as an Excel spreadsheet, with a clickable link for every entry.

🔗 Browse: Genealogy Resources Directory  ·  📥 Subscriber download: the link to the Excel edition is in your emailed copy of this edition (and on the page you saw when you confirmed your subscription).

💾 Exporting your tree from any program

Last month's Ancestry tutorial now has a companion covering everything else: step-by-step GEDCOM export instructions for MyHeritage, Findmypast, FamilySearch, RootsMagic, Family Tree Maker, Legacy, Family Historian, Gramps and MacFamilyTree, and a short checklist of what to look at in the file before it is printed. If you use software we have missed, reply and tell us which.

🔗 Read the guide: How to Export Your Family Tree as a GEDCOM File

📝 Also new on the site

Genealogy and Family Tree Software Review 2026 compares twelve platforms with UK and US pricing and a scored ranking of the top ten. The Geometry, History and Maths of Family Trees explains why a circle is the honest shape for six generations, and what Ahnentafel numbering is for. And a note of something we are proud of: from July 2026 to September 2028 the studio is sponsoring the web design and hosting of Belfast Star Basketball Club's new website.