Birth and Death Name Statistics for England and Wales, 1733-2024

Two datasets of summary statistics processed from millions of birth and death records from England and Wales. Dataset_B covers births from 1837 to 2024, and dataset_D covers deaths from 1733 to 2009, with records standardized to represent the year of birth. The data is sourced from the volunteer-run UK Local BMD project and was last updated with records as of January 13, 2026.

Use Cases

• Analyze long-term trends in surname and middle name usage based on annual name counts.
• Compare birth and death record name statistics across different English and Welsh regions.
• Study demographic shifts and population sample characteristics over centuries.

Strengths

• Data spans a long historical period, with birth records from 1837-2024 and death records from 1733-2009.
• Based on millions of transcribed birth and death records from a volunteer project covering 12 specific regions.
• Datasets are structured to be directly comparable by standardizing records to the year of birth.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect geographic bias inherent to the 12 specific source regions.

Provenance

Source

UK Local BMD volunteer project transcriptions.

Collection Method

Processed from raw birth and death records using underlying parsing code.

Time Range

Births: 1837-2024; Deaths (standardized to birth year): 1733-2009.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-11 04:19:07

Geography

12 cities, counties, and regions in England and Wales: Bath, Berkshire, Cheshire, Cumbria, Kingston-upon-Thames, Lancashire, North Wales, Shropshire, Staffordshire, West Midlands, Wiltshire, Yorkshire.