Find your ancestors in our historical records from around the world...

How to get the most out of our world search

Here you can search all our records for Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and the United States. You can search all our records from England, Wales and Scotland using the same searches you did before.

Use the box at the top of the search to start your search

Search for your ancestors by entering a first name, last name or both. You can choose to select a date range for the event you're searching for and a region to focus your search on. You can also enter keywords – these are useful if you need to narrow down your results. Keywords can be anything from place names to military ranks.

Tick the 'Include variants' boxes underneath the first and last name fields to see spelling variations of your ancestor's name in your search results. This is a really handy tool because often our ancestors didn't spell their names as we expect! Smith, for example, could be Smyth or even Smythe. Seeing all possible spellings in your search results will help you track down your ancestor.

Use the filters on the left to narrow your results

Your results are grouped by the category of record and record collection and will show you matches for each collection.

Tick the boxes next to the filters on the left to narrow down your results. Un-tick the box to remove the filter.

You can sort your results by relevance, first name, last name, year, category, sub-category and record set.

You'll see how many pages of results your search returned on the right of the page. Click on the arrows or the page numbers to view each page.

View your results as normal

Next to each record you'll see View with the option to 'view transcript' and/or 'view image'. Viewing the transcript will show you a typed version of what's on the original record. Viewing the image will take you to a scanned copy of the original record. Note that you cannot yet send us corrections to records but this feature will be added shortly.

Getting back to your search results

To return to your search results from an image or transcript, click 'Back to search results' or the 'back' button in your browser.