23 January 2015

Ancestry adds recent British Death Indexes

When the British government ended availability of recent civil registration indexes an opportunity opened up for the private sector. One of the companies that stepped in to the breach is Wilmington Millennium providing a service to help keep company customer databases up to date and avoid fraud by people using a deceased's identity.

Now Ancestry has made some of that data available on two databases:

England and Wales, Death Index, 2007-2013, with 1,492,728 records
Scotland and Northern Ireland, Death Index, 1989-2013, with 413,518 records

I wondered if the data for England and Wales was a copy of the probate index, also on Ancestry. A small sample showed a little overlap. Some deaths I know occurred are missing.

While all the examples I checked used data from Wilmington Millennium the overall sources for the Ancestry database is given as "British Death Indexes. Various sources." Perhaps there are others.

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