Public launch of FreeREG 2

[Ben Brumfield]

I'm very pleased to announce that the new FreeREG database of UK parish registers has gone live at http://freereg2.freereg.org.uk/

The database contains more than thirty million records of baptisms, marriages, and burials from Thomas Cromwell's order that such records be kept in 1538 up to the establishment of the civil registry of births, marriages, and deaths in 1837.

The FreeREG 2.1.1 release largely recapitulates the researcher functionality of the old FreeREG 1 website ( http://www.freereg.org.uk/cgi/Search.pl ), with additional support for GIS-enabled proximity searches and name searches that match abbreviated or Latinized forms in the original registers.  The source code for the database engine is at https://github.com/FreeUKGen/MyopicVicar and is released under an Apache license.

The official announcement by Free UK Genealogy is at http://www.freeukgenealogy.org.uk/blog/2015/04/14/a-new-start-for-freereg/

Ben Brumfield

[Tony Proctor]

Thanks Ben. Earlier this year, I contacted FreeReg with some suggestions, listed below. Do you know if which ones were addressed?

 

1) Layout of the fields and lists

2) Ability to search by given-name, without a surname

3) Use of wildcards

4) When searching for deaths, some way of specifying year of birth (like the '@' on FreeBMD) rather than explicit year of death

5) Some improvements to the 'Place' list which is quite hard to scroll because of the number of entries. Can they be hidden if not relevant to any selected counties?

 

    Tony Proctor

--

---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "rootsdev" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rootsdev+u...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Ben Brumfield]

Hi Tony,

I don't get any of those emails, so I'm not sure which were yours.  (Minimizing developer time on mailing lists was one of the heuristics which finally got this shipped.)

I do know that #2 was added about two months ago and is functional on http://freereg2.freereg.org.uk/

You will need to restrict by county if you do a forename-only search, however.

Wildcards are scheduled for version 2.1.4, which will be the next release that addresses researcher functionality.  I believe that I'll be tackling UCF at the same time.

We do support birth year searches, but for baptism records only.  I'll have to take another look at the CSV format our volunteers use for burial records to see if we even have age-at-death or birth-year to draw from as we create records in the search engine.

The new Place list only fetches places for the county that has been selected, and restricts the places available to those for which we have data.

Glad to see you involved!

Ben

[todd.d....@gmail.com]

Congrats Ben and co.!

What's the front-end built with?

Tod Robbins

Digital Asset Manager, MLIS

todrobbins.com | @todrobbins

[Ben Brumfield]

Thanks, Tod!

The front-end design work was done by a third party, but is also open-sourced at https://github.com/FreeUKGen/Free-Reg-Frontend

Ben

[Colin Spencer]

Ben,

Wow, what a makeover. Congratulations to the team.

Colin

[Tony Proctor]

Ben, we need some help with FreeREG, and FreeUKGEN generally, over on the Evidence Explained Web site at  https://www.evidenceexplained.com/content/citing-online-database-no-obvious-name). Can you help out?

 

Issues include:

-- What are the accepted database names for each of the projects?
--  If there aren't any, can we have some for consistency of citations?
--  Is "FreeBMD" is just one of the projects, a registered charity, or the "creator" of the other projects?
-- The introductory message on the FreeREG2 appears to be wrong

 

More details are on that thread.

[Gary Stanley]

I think I'm somewhat late to the party joining this group, but congratulations on the new version of FreeREG ... it's a site I use on an almost daily basis.
Can I ask a developer a question about it though? I emailed FreeREG (among others, such as Finmypast, Ancestry, etc) if it was or would be possible to search specific record sets - like baptisms - on fields such as "abode" or "fathers occupation". I only ever heard back from FreeREG saying "that's a great idea, we'll ask the devs", but I never heard back!!!
The reason specifically that I personally what to do this, is because I am searching for records relating to Romany Gipsies; those elusive ancestors that roamed this country (and others!) and could literally be found baptising children anywhere in England. Being able - for example - to search the occupation field for terms such as "gipsy/traveller/itinerant/mendicant/vagrant/stranger" would make life so much easier to find them!!
I know this might cause a big hit processing wise on a large data set, but if this kind of search was limited to counties or parishes, would that be feasible? Being able to do this would transform a difficult area of genealogy research literally overnight ...