Findmypast

Findmypast

Type	Limited Company
Industry	Genealogy Online publishing Online services
Founded	2003
Headquarters	London, United Kingdom
Key people	Annelies van den Belt (CEO)
Owner	DC Thomson
Number of employees	100
Website	www.findmypast.co.uk

Findmypast is a UK-based online genealogy service owned, since 2007, by British company DC Thomson. The website hosts over 4 billion searchable records of census, directory and historical record information. It originated in 1965 when a group of genealogists formed a group named "Title Research". The first internet website went live in 2003.

As of 2016, Findmypast has partnered with many other genealogical organisations and hosts much of their data. It started sponsoring Yesterday, a UKTV channel, in 2010 and produced a series of programmes. In 2014 a change in its website user interface was subject to much discussion.

In 1965, a small group of professional genealogists and probate researchers called themselves "Title Research". They did much of their research using microfiche records. In 2001, Title Research started an in-house project, called "1837 online", to produce a computerised version of the birth, marriage and death register pages of the General Register Office (GRO), and the following year began work to put this on an internet website. Another online project, FreeBMD, had already been working on this since 1999, gradually transcribing the indexes through the efforts of volunteers and publishing searchable indexes freely on the internet.

In April 2003, www.1837online.com went live on the internet. This was a pay-per-view service allowing access to images of the pages of the original GRO registers. Initially there was no index of individual entries for the period before 1984, but subsequent years had already been electronically recorded by the GRO and were fully searchable. Gradually the UK Censuses, passenger lists, and other databases were added to the site, the first being an index of the 1861 England and Wales Census in 2005.

1837online rebranded as Findmypast in November 2006 because its scope had spread beyond the GRO registers, and was awarded the Queen's Award for Innovation in 2007 for the "provision of public internet access to official genealogy records". In 2007 it was purchased from Title Research Group by DC Thomson. In 2008 Findmypast published the 1851 and 1901 censuses online, and it also gained a license to publish the 1911 England and Wales Census. In 2011 it became sponsor of the Society of Genealogists in their centenary year and agreed a reciprocal arrangement where each would give access to one another's online databases.