02 April 2021

Findmypast Weekly Update: Modern Deaths

Two modern UK death collections are new and updated on Findmypast.

England & Wales Deaths 2007-2020—over 353,000 new records, compiled from sources other than the GRO, total of 3,273,531 records in this collection. It includes 176,211 (608,016) deaths for 2020, 153,823 (530,841) for 2019, 184,230 (541,589) for 2018. The numbers in brackets are from the Office of National Statistics showing that about one-third of the deaths are captured by this database.

These records are "transcriptions only...compiled from civic records and funeral homes, and is published as a result of our partnership with Wilmington Millennium Ltd." "Most records usually contain all or some of the following fields: Title, first name, last name, gender, age, approximate birth year (based on age at year of death), death year, death date, residence, area, geo direction, postcode area, postcode district, postcode sector, county, country."

If you use Ancestry you may recall that Wilmington Millennium is the source for their database England and Wales, Death Index, 1989-2019. For 2019 it has 191,625 records, and for 2018 contains 184,548 records.

The other Findmypast collection with additions is Ireland, Northern Ireland Deaths 1998-2020. There are over 5,000 new records, the new total is over 92,000 records. There are 2,794 (17,474) records for 2020, 2,500 (15,671) for 2019 and 2,716 (15,763) for 2018. The number in brackets shows that's slightly under 20% of the total deaths recorded by the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency. The source, Wilmington Millennium, and format of the results are as for England and Wales.

The equivalent database on Ancestry is Scotland and Northern Ireland, Death Index, 1989-2019 with a total of 650,151 records, 88,160 for Northern Ireland.

Now to MyHeritage and their collection United Kingdom, Death Index, 1980-2020 with a total of 6,351,219 records. For 2020 it shows 147,707 results, for 2019 a total of 324,646 results, and for 2018 a total of 269,720, in each case for England and Wales combined. 

The bottom line is that Findmypast and MyHeritage have records for 2020 not yet available via Ancestry.  MyHeritage, which does not give a source for its data, has more results for some of these years than either Findmypast or Ancestry. For none of them is there anything like a complete collection for the years included.



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