About Us

We provide a well regarded programme of education and training enabling people to research their roots and to understand what they’ve found – confident that trees are sound, ancestors belong, and written names can become real and rounded family members. We’re a diverse community – expert, novice, published historian, first-time tree-tracer – learning and improving together, sharing ideas and advice, generous with our knowledge and time.

We are UK based but international in outlook with members across four continents. We’ve got 110 years under our belt but we’re as committed and curious as ever, staying true to our own history, championing those whose lives lie undiscovered. Knowledge of our past helps illuminate the present and guide the future – so we continue to research, learning from the extraordinary lives of ordinary men and women, of every race and place and class and creed.

Our collections are particularly valuable for research before the start of civil registration of births marriages and deaths in 1837 but there is plenty for the beginner too, including the Free Family History Access area where beginners can get a taste of some of the online sources that will help them start their research.

We have many unique unpublished manuscript notes and printed and unpublished family histories. We hold the largest collection of parish register copies and many nonconformist registers. Along with registers, we hold local histories, copies of churchyard gravestone inscriptions, poll books, trade directories, census indexes and a wealth of information about the parishes where our ancestors lived.

Many of our unique indexes are online including Boyd’s Marriage Index with more than 7 million names, indexes of wills and marriage licences, apprentices and masters (1710-1774), London City Apprenticeships, Boyd’s Inhabitants of London as well as records such as the Bank of England will abstracts, Trinity House petitions and information on Teachers and Civil Servants. Preview