Hi Everybody, Now we are into the New Year I thought it was time for an update on the FreeREG project at www.freereg.org.uk The system is now live and the first records are available for searching, although there is only a small amount of data on there at the moment. FreeREG is a sister project to FreeCEN & FreeBMD, but aims to put all the OPRs online - eventually. As you can imagine, it is a huge project and will take a long time to do. I am the County Coordinator for Berwickshire and have all of the films available for distribution to interested volunteers to transcribe. If your Family History research is in one particular area or parish, then why not volunteer to transcribe that area for FreeREG and get the FULL details for your family from the original registers. All you need is to have, or have access to, a microfiche reader (the film is cut up into strips) - and we use a Windows program called WinREG to enter the data into. Unfortunately we cannot have cds for this project. WHY SHOULD I VOLUNTEER? ======================= I'm not sure if you are all aware, but in a LOT of parishes on the IGI only the female Baptisms have been recorded! Ever wondered why you couldn't find an entry for one of your male ancestors - now you know why. Now is your chance to find those missing records! From personal experience I have found during transcription that there are possibly extra details available - Fathers Residence, Fathers Occupation, Witnesses names etc. What you really get out of it is the tremendous satisfaction that you are helping future generations of people researching their family history to find their ancestors more easily than we can now. That just about sums it up. This transcription will have far more information in it than is available at present on the IGI. If you are at all interested you can contact us via the above website or write to me, Dale Utterson, (Berwickshire Co-ordinator) at dale@utterson.com for more information. Best regards Dale Utterson Derbyshire, UK Berwickshire County Coordinator FreeREG Project - Free Internet searches of Baptism, Marriage & Burial records pre 1855 http://www.freereg.org.uk