Starting with records from London’s infamous Victorian workhouses memorably depicted by Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist, the collection will include more than 77 million records, providing an unprecedented insight into the colorful history of one of the world’s greatest cities. 

Key record types include parish and workhouse records, electoral rolls, wills, land tax records and school reports. According to a recent family history survey, more than half of the current British population will have an ancestor in these historic London records. In addition, it is estimated that approximately 135 million people from the U.S., Canada and Australia will also be able to trace ancestors in the collection due to London’s status as the city at the centre of the British Empire for centuries.

Assembled over time direct from various London institutions, the final collection, estimated to be completed in 2010, will include the names of millions of ordinary Londoners alongside famous and infamous figures from the city’s past from Oliver Cromwell to John Milton.

The workhouse or ‘Board of Guardians’ records now online contain the names of those who were born, baptised or died in a London workhouse in the 19^th and early 20^th century. During this time, men, women and children who couldn’t support themselves were forced to live in these institutions, working long hours in tedious jobs in exchange for minimal food and board.

The conditions were kept intentionally poor to deter others and unofficial beatings or starving of inmates were not unheard of. Overcrowding was also a major problem, compounded by the influx of Irish immigrants after the potato famine of the mid 19^th century. While conditions improved slightly in the early 20^th century, the workhouses were still a feared ‘last resort’ by most until their abolition in 1930.

Today’s release includes records from: Poplar, Paddington, St Marylebone, St Pancras, Southwark, Islington, Stepney, Westminster, Lambeth, Wandsworth, Holborn and Hampstead. The remaining regions will launch online in the coming months. Also included today are a variety of workhouse creed registers, admissions, discharges, apprenticeship papers and lists of ‘lunatics’.

Access the data through one of these recently added databases:

 London, England, Births and Baptisms, 1834-1906

London, England, Deaths and Burials, 1834-1934

London, England, Poor Law Records, 1840-1938

Workhouse records are just one of the record types which comprise the London Historical Records, 1500s-1900s. Future updates will include:

Parish Registers – from 1538, priests had to keep records of all baptisms, marriages and burials in their parish. These records are taken from over 10,000 Greater London parishes, and as they pre-date both civil registration and censuses, they are the essential ‘next step back’ for people wishing to trace their family genealogy beyond the 19^th century.  

School Admissions and Discharges – contain records taken from 800+ London schools dating from the early Victorian times through to 1911. They provide admission details and information about millions of London students. 

Non-Conformist Registers – details the birth, baptism, death and burial of religious dissenters who did not worship at the established church in England from 1694 to 1921. The majority of the records are for Methodist, Baptist and United Reformed churches, although there are smaller collections of other denominations such as Quakers and Seventh Day Adventists

Many of you may be familiar with the previous GRO Birth Index that was indexed by surname range only.  A search would produce a list of all pages on which the searched name might appear, but referenced by the first and last name on those pages only.  Now, every name in the GRO Birth Index is individually searchable. 

The newly updated Birth Index is comprised of only two separate collections instead of the three collections that existed previously. The England & Wales, FreeBMD Birth Index, 1837-1915 includes births registered from 1837 to 1915 and was keyed by FreeBMD, a group of independent volunteers dedicated to transcribing civil registration indexes of birth, marriage and death records for England and Wales. 

The second, England & Wales, Birth Index, 1916-2005, includes the birth index from 1916 to 1983, which has been transcribed by Ancestry.com, and the GRO published index from 1984 to 2005. Images of the index are only available up to 1983.

We are currently working to also fully index the GRO Marriage and Death indexes. When complete, more than 250 million individual birth, marriage and death (BMD) records will be searchable. As ‘core’ record sets, this major enhancement to Ancestry’s BMD collection will be of great benefit to all UK family history researchers.