In 2000 Cheshire's Registration Services became the first in the country to post their Birth, Marriage and Death records on the Internet. Wiltshire and North East Somerset is the seventh to use the Cheshire system, and the 15th overall.

WiltshireBMD is a joint project between the county's registration service and independent volunteers and family history societies, to revolutionise public access to records dating back from the start of Queen Victoria's reign.

In the past, most enquiries for copy certificates have involved Registrars manually searching through hand-written indexes which refer to weighty copperplate ledgers. But now the indexes to an estimated one million births, marriages and deaths from 1837 to 2003 are being made freely available to family historians throughout the world on the WiltshireBMD web-site.

Researchers can make use of the site's user-friendly search techniques to identify the names they are looking for, and obtain reference numbers from which Registrars can supply the birth, marriage and death certificates.