News and Articles
21 April 2007
The Queen's Award Press Release
Title Research Group Limited has won the prestigious Queen’s Award for Enterprise: Innovation 2007 for making the scanned birth, marriage and death indexes for England and Wales available online for the very first time through its subsidiary findmypast.co.uk.
Until this century, the national Birth, Marriage and Death indexes, which go back to 1837, were only accessible on microfiche films available at certain locations in England. Following the transcription, scanning and indexing of over two million images, the company launched a new website in 2003 called 1837online.com, which gave the public easy and fast access to the indexes. The launch was instrumental in creating the widespread interest in genealogy that we see in the UK today, and led to a growth in websites, magazines and television programmes on family history research. The website was re-named findmypast.co.uk and continues to add millions of genealogical records for customers to search.
Tom Curran, Chief Executive of Title Research Group commented: "This is a great honour for findmypast.co.uk and we are delighted to receive the award. It recognises all the hard work that everyone put in to getting the records digitised and online. This has been a very successful year for the company and we look forward to continuing success."
The company continues to innovate, putting online the passenger list for the Titanic for the very first time earlier this month, which up until then had been kept under lock and key at The National Archives.
Contact:
Vicky Perry
Lansons Communications
+44 (0)207 566 9708
Notes to editors
Title Research Group Limited is the holding company for Title Research, founded in 1965, and findmypast.co.uk, founded in 2003. Title Research provides genealogy research services to the legal profession and other professionals needing to locate next of kin.
In the course of its work the company needed to consult the Birth, Marriage and Death indexes on a daily basis and took the decision to scan and digitise these to increase its own efficiency. This was the first time that these records had been scanned, transcribed and indexed. Having completed this massive project, Title Research Group then decided to put the indexes on the internet at findmypast.co.uk, enabling those interested in family history to access them from anywhere in the world.
Title Research Group has 65 employees based at sites in London, Horsham and Edinburgh
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