British Family Tree Research, Tips, Techniques and News
Author: Nick Thorne, The Nosey Genealogist
Nick Thorne is The Nosey Genealogist. He has been researching his family tree for many years and has learned many tip and tricks from the professionals in that time. By thinking of himself as "an advanced beginner" he reads avidly around the subject and enrols on courses so that he can pass on the information to you.
The General Register Office (GRO) for England and Wales has put the prices up for ordering birth, marriage and death record certificates.
Now, to order a digital image download (instantly available after purchase) it will cost £3 (previously £2.50).
The new price for a PDF (available for births from 1837 to 1934 and 1984 to 2021 and deaths from 1837 to 1957 and 1984 to 2021, which takes up to four working days to become available) is £8 (up from £7).
For a print certificate with an index reference the price has now become £12.50 (was £11).
£16 is the new price for a print certificate without an index reference (increased from £14).
Unlock the Military Histories of Your Ancestors with TheGenealogist’s Latest Release of Army Lists
The Genealogist has added 1.8 million individuals to its Military Collection with its latest release of Army Lists from 1837 to 1959.
Family history research often requires scouring military records to uncover the career details of ancestors who had served in the British Army. A key resource for such research are the officially published Army Lists that provide comprehensive details about officers and warrant officers, including their ranks, regiments, and service appointments.
Subscribers to TheGenealogist can now access an extensive collection of digitised Army Lists, which can significantly enhance their understanding of an ancestor’s military career. These records detail officers by regiment, rank and seniority, offering a detailed snapshot of the officer corps at any given time.
CAPTAIN (TEMPORARY LIEUTENANT-COLONEL) A. C. DE WIART ADVANCING TO THE ATTACK THROUGH AN INTENSE FIRE BARRAGE
This resource is excellent for tracking the careers of officers, offering a chronological record of promotions, transfers, and retirements. It provides a wealth of information crucial for family historians, including dates of promotions, brevet ranks, and the duration of an officer’s service. Additionally, these records include information about officers who retired or resigned, often with specific dates of departure from active service.
The Army Lists can provide insights into where officers served in staff positions or held special appointments, for example as instructors or aides-de-camp. This additional context can be invaluable in understanding an officer’s career and their contributions to the military beyond their regimental duties.
Moreover, the lists encompass officers serving in colonial forces and the Indian Army, reflecting the global reach of the British Empire. Some officers may have transferred between these forces, further enriching the historical context for researchers.
TheGenealogist’s digitised Army Lists are an indispensable tool for anyone looking to explore their family’s military history. With this resource, family historians can uncover the detailed dates of their ancestors’ service and gain a deeper understanding of their military careers and contributions.
For a limited time, you can claim a Diamond Subscription to The Genealogist for just £89.95, a saving of £50! Plus you will get a free Subscription to Discover Your Ancestors Online Magazine (Worth £24.99)
This offer comes with a Lifetime Discount, meaning you’ll pay the same discounted price every time your subscription renews.
This offer expires on 31st July 2024.
About TheGenealogist
TheGenealogist is an award-winning online family history website, who put a wealth of information at the fingertips of family historians. Their approach is to bring hard to use physical records to life online with easy to use interfaces such as their Tithe and newly released Lloyd George Domesday collections.
TheGenealogist’s innovative SmartSearch technology links records together to help you find your ancestors more easily. TheGenealogist is one of the leading providers of online family history records. Along with the standard Birth, Marriage, Death and Census records, they also have significant collections of Parish and Nonconformist records, PCC Will Records, Irish Records, Military records, Occupations, Newspaper record collections amongst many others.
TheGenealogist uses the latest technology to help you bring your family history to life. Use TheGenealogist to find your ancestors today!
*Disclosure: Please note, this post contains affiliate links. This does notmean that you pay more, just that I make a percentage on the sales from my links. The payments help me pay for the cost of running the site. You may like to read this explanation here:
For the first time, you can now pin down your ancestors in 1851!
TheGenealogist’s latest release makes it easy to locate an ancestor geographically in the 1851 census. With a choice of historical and modern georeferenced maps, this welcome development makes it simple to explore the place where your ancestors lived and discover their surroundings.
Census records have always been a staple resource for family historians. With the particulars of the street or road name, researchers will often turn to a modern map to see if they can locate where their forebears lived. This, however, can be fraught with difficulties if the road name changed over the years or the area was redeveloped. Thus, TheGenealogist has been working through its census collection, linking the records to the detailed map collections on its Map Explorer™.
The 1851 Census of Edinburgh linked to Map Explorer™ locating Howard Place, the family home of novelist Robert Louis Stevenson
The 1851 census now joins the ranks of other key censuses (1861, 1871, 1881, 1891, 1901, 1911, and the 1939 Register) already integrated with the innovative Map Explorer™.
With just a click of a button, researchers can pin their forebears’ residences down to a parish, street or building and trace the routes they would have taken to visit local shops, pubs, churches, workplaces, and parks.
Historical maps reveal the location of major roads and the nearest railway stations, shedding light on how our ancestors would have travelled to other parts of the country to work, visit relatives or their hometowns.
With this latest release, subscribers of TheGenealogist can now explore their ancestors’ neighbourhood in 1851, making it easier to uncover hidden stories and discover connections to family that lived nearby.
For those family historians on the move, TheGenealogist allows you to trace your forebears’ footprints while walking down modern streets using their “Locate me” feature. Imagine retracing your ancestors’ steps and discovering the places that they had frequented!
When viewing a household record from the 1851 census on TheGenealogist, you’ll now see a map indicating where your ancestor was during the night of the census. Clicking on this map seamlessly loads the location in Map Explorer™, enabling you to explore the area.
Read TheGenealogist’s feature article where the 1851 census locates the Edinburgh house where a famous author was born:
For a limited time, you can claim a Diamond Subscription to The Genealogist for just £89.95, a saving of £50! You’ll also receive a free Research Pack worth over £60.
This offer comes with a Lifetime Discount, meaning you’ll pay the same discounted price every time your subscription renews.
This offer expires on 31st July 2024.
This offer includes a free research pack containing the following:- – Subscription to Discover Your Ancestors Online Magazine (Worth £24.99) – Researching and Locating Your Ancestors Book by Celia Heritage (Worth £9.95) – Regional Research Guidebook by Andrew Chapman (Worth £9.95) – Family Tree Chart (Folded) – Birth Year from Census Date Calculator – 10 Generation Relationship Calculator – Ticket to The Family History Show – choose from York 2024, London 2024 or Online 2025
Total Savings: £113.24 – Save Over 55%
About TheGenealogist
TheGenealogist is an award-winning online family history website, who put a wealth of information at the fingertips of family historians. Their approach is to bring hard to use physical records to life online with easy to use interfaces such as their Tithe and newly released Lloyd George Domesday collections.
TheGenealogist’s innovative SmartSearch technology links records together to help you find your ancestors more easily. TheGenealogist is one of the leading providers of online family history records. Along with the standard Birth, Marriage, Death and Census records, they also have significant collections of Parish and Nonconformist records, PCC Will Records, Irish Records, Military records, Occupations, Newspaper record collections amongst many others.
TheGenealogist uses the latest technology to help you bring your family history to life. Use TheGenealogist to find your ancestors today!
*Disclosure: Please note, this post contains affiliate links. This does notmean that you pay more, just that I make a percentage on the sales from my links. The payments help me pay for the cost of running the site. You may like to read this explanation here:
TheGenealogist has released 225,395 heads of households and property owners from the 1910-1915 Lloyd George Domesday Survey, covering the county of Surrey.
This boosts its ever-growing Landowner and Occupier records from this period to a total of over 2.6 million. The coverage of these IR 58 records now includes all the boroughs of Greater London plus Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Oxfordshire, Middlesex, Northamptonshire and with this release, Surrey.
Fully searchable on TheGenealogist and added to its powerful Map Explorer™, this resource allows researchers to find ancestors’ property from all of Surrey’s parishes.
Lloyd George Domesday Survey map locating a plot linked to the record of renowned horticulturist Gertrude Jekyll on TheGenealogist
The records reveal the names of owners and occupiers of each property and can provide detailed descriptions of the numbers and types of rooms in the house, plus what it was constructed of and the extent of its garden or grounds. A great example is Munstead Wood, which we look at in our featured article below. It was described as being a detached residence built of Bargate stone, brick and tile. There was a hall, sitting room, dining room, book room, workshop, kitchen and scullery. Also noted were the store rooms, some spare rooms and offices. The residence was a four bedroom home, with another three rooms allocated as servant’s bedrooms. Covering 14 acres, this home and grounds can then be seen on the contemporary map, linked to the record, as a triangular plot outside the town of Godalming.
This extensive project has seen a long term collaboration between The National Archives and TheGenealogist toconserve and digitise these records. These Lloyd George Domesday Survey records comprise the IR 58 Field Books and their accompanying IR 121 to IR 135 Ordnance Survey maps and join the millions of records in TheGenealogist’s powerful research tool, Map Explorer™.
To celebrate this latest release of the Lloyd George Domesday Records, TheGenealogist is offering readers a superb offer! You can claim their Diamond package for just £114.95, (£60 off,plusa subscription to the Discover Your Ancestors Online Periodical worth £24.99) Total saving £84.95!
This offer comes with a Lifetime Discount, meaning you’ll pay the same discounted price every time your subscription renews.
TheGenealogist is an award-winning online family history website, who put a wealth of information at the fingertips of family historians. Their approach is to bring hard to use physical records to life online with easy to use interfaces such as their Tithe and newly released Lloyd George Domesday collections.
TheGenealogist’s innovative SmartSearch technology links records together to help you find your ancestors more easily. TheGenealogist is one of the leading providers of online family history records. Along with the standard Birth, Marriage, Death and Census records, they also have significant collections of Parish and Nonconformist records, PCC Will Records, Irish Records, Military records, Occupations, Newspaper record collections amongst many others.
TheGenealogist uses the latest technology to help you bring your family history to life. Use TheGenealogist to find your ancestors today!
*Disclosure: Please note, this post contains affiliate links. This does notmean that you pay more, just that I make a percentage on the sales from my links. The payments help me pay for the cost of running the site. You may like to read this explanation here:
We have all delved into our family history yearning to understand the lives of our ancestors, but after we have found them in the births, marriages and death records we will often turn to the census records to discover where they lived. But what happens if you’ve hit a brick wall in your research, struggling to piece together the puzzle of their past because they were, somehow, not at home on census night? What resource can we turn to as a substitute?
It may be that we have found our ancestor in their home and discovered that their occupation reveals that they were a shopkeeper or small business person. What we would now like to know is where they ran their business from and discover more about the village, town or area of the city in which they worked.
The latest release from TheGenealogist contains over 10 million new individuals recorded in directories from the first two decades of the 20th Century*. This virtual bookshelf stacked with volumes from the early 1900s to 1929 includes publications from all over the United Kingdom and Ireland.
These directories are filled with listings of people, their addresses and details of the places they lived in. Other directories list businesses and offer a fascinating glimpse into ancestors from this time.
Harris & Co can be found in the Hampshire directories on TheGenealogist
You can use these records to discover the street address of your great-grandfather or their shop/business, perhaps learn where your great-grandmother practised her dressmaking trade from, or find the names of your ancestors’ neighbours in the street listings. These directories will also reveal any listings of official positions that they may have held in charities, societies, local administration, etc., or even unearth your ancestor’s telephone number!
With some books you can read topographical details about the village, town or city in which your ancestor lived. This will give you a better feel for what their area was like at the time that your forebears lived there.
Better than 50% off!
To celebrate this latest release, TheGenealogist is offering its 12 months Diamond Package for just £98.95 – that’s over 50% off!
To find out more and claim the offer, visit: Better than Half-Price Offer
Expires on 12th May 2024.
This offer includes a lifetime discount! Your subscription will renew at the same discounted price every year you stay with them.
This includes the following:-
Subscription to Discover Your Ancestors Online Magazine (Worth £24.99)
Discover Your Ancestors’ Occupations by Laura Berry (Worth £9.95)
Researching and Locating Your Ancestors by Celia Heritage (Worth £9.95)
Regional Research Guidebook by Andrew Chapman (Worth £9.95)
Discover Your Ancestors Periodical Compendium Volume 1 (Worth £9.95)
Total Savings: £105.79
TheGenealogist is an award-winning online family history website, who put a wealth of information at the fingertips of family historians. Their approach is to bring hard to use physical records to life online with easy to use interfaces such as their Tithe and newly released Lloyd George Domesday collections.
TheGenealogist’s innovative SmartSearch technology links records together to help you find your ancestors more easily. TheGenealogist is one of the leading providers of online family history records. Along with the standard Birth, Marriage, Death and Census records, they also have significant collections of Parish and Nonconformist records, PCC Will Records, Irish Records, Military records, Occupations, Newspaper record collections amongst many others.
TheGenealogist uses the latest technology to help you bring your family history to life. Use TheGenealogist to find your ancestors today!
*Disclosure: Please note, this post contains affiliate links. This does notmean that you pay more, just that I make a percentage on the sales from my links. The payments help me pay for the cost of running the site. You may like to read this explanation here:
Disclosure: Please note this post contains affiliate links.*
NEWS: Here is a press release published today by TheGenealogist
Get ready to paint the town green this St. Patrick’s Day with a bumper release from TheGenealogist! They have just announced the release of 1,769,007 individuals to their Irish Catholic Parish Record Collection and 1,263,399 Irish Wills for their subscribers.
For the many family historians with Irish ancestors, these latest records will be a welcome addition to the celebrations of this day that is so close to the hearts of the Irish.
Also making up the releases in the “St Patrick’s Day Parade” are these records of Irish wills: Dublin Will and Grant Books 1272-1858,Calendar of Wills and Administrations 1858-1922, Irish Will Indexes 1484-1858, Prerogative and Diocesan Copies of Wills and Indexes 1596-1858, Will Registers 1858-1900 and Soldiers’ Wills 1914-1918
So raise a glass of Guinness, wear some green and enjoy this latest release from the Emerald Isle.
TheGenealogist is an award-winning online family history website, who put a wealth of information at the fingertips of family historians. Their approach is to bring hard to use physical records to life online with easy to use interfaces such as their Tithe and newly released Lloyd George Domesday collections.
TheGenealogist’s innovative SmartSearch technology links records together to help you find your ancestors more easily. TheGenealogist is one of the leading providers of online family history records. Along with the standard Birth, Marriage, Death and Census records, they also have significant collections of Parish and Nonconformist records, PCC Will Records, Irish Records, Military records, Occupations, Newspaper record collections amongst many others.
TheGenealogist uses the latest technology to help you bring your family history to life. Use TheGenealogist to find your ancestors today!
*Disclosure: Please note, this post contains affiliate links. This does notmean that you pay more, just that I make a percentage on the sales from my links. The payments help me pay for the cost of running the site. You may like to read this explanation here:
123,255 individuals recorded in Worcestershire Parish Records have just been released by TheGenealogist in time for The Family History Show, Midlands on Saturday 16th March 2023.
This welcome addition to TheGenealogist’s growing collection of parish records includes transcripts of early entries stretching back to Tudor times. Family historians with ancestors from this English county now have the chance to go as far back as 1538 – a time when Henry VIII had recently become the Supreme Head of the Church of England (1534), was dissolving the monasteries and had, by then, been married three times!
Released in association with Malvern Family History Society, this is the latest fruit of an ongoing collaboration where high-quality transcripts of Parish Records are being made available on TheGenealogist, as well as FHS-Online.
The Green, Broadway, Worcestershire from TheGenealogist’s Image Archive
In this latest release from Worcestershire, records from the following parishes have been included: Abberley, Abbots Morton, Alfrick with Lulsley, Alvechurch, Areley Kings, Astley, Bayton, Belbroughton, Bengeworth, Beoley, Berrow, Besford, Birlingham, Birtsmorton, Bishampton, Bockleton, Bredon, Broadway, Bromsgrove, Chaddesley Corbett, Church Honeybourne, Church Lench, Churchill with Blakedown, Claines, Cleeve Prior, Clifton on Teme, Cofton Hackett, Colwall, Daylesford, Leigh with Bransford, Lindridge, Mathon, Pershore Holy Cross, Pershore St Andrews, Pontardawe, Redmarley D’Abitot, Shipston on Stour, Shipston-on-Stour, Teddington, Warndon, Welland, Whittington, Wick, and Wolverley.
This collaboration is part of an ongoing project where family history societies transcribe records for their areas before they are released on both TheGenealogist and on FHS-Online. The latter website brings together data from various Family History Societies across the UK, while providing a much needed extra source of funds for societies.
If your society is interested in publishing records online, please take a look at www.fhs-online.co.uk.
TheGenealogist is an award-winning online family history website, who put a wealth of information at the fingertips of family historians. Their approach is to bring hard to use physical records to life online with easy to use interfaces such as their Tithe and newly released Lloyd George Domesday collections.
TheGenealogist’s innovative SmartSearch technology links records together to help you find your ancestors more easily. TheGenealogist is one of the leading providers of online family history records. Along with the standard Birth, Marriage, Death and Census records, they also have significant collections of Parish and Nonconformist records, PCC Will Records, Irish Records, Military records, Occupations, Newspaper record collections amongst many others.
TheGenealogist uses the latest technology to help you bring your family history to life. Use TheGenealogist to find your ancestors today!
*Disclosure: Please note, this post contains affiliate links. This does notmean that you pay more, just that I make a percentage on the sales from my links. The payments help me pay for the cost of running the site. You may like to read this explanation here:
The latest edition of Discover Your Ancestors, the quality super-packed family history magazine has just been published with several of my articles included! Look out for those penned by Nick Thorne.
Discover Your Ancestors Magazine Issue 11 has 152 pages packed with new in-depth articles, research advice, social and general history, ‘how to’ features, case studies, places in focus, and much more!
This issue features:
Celebrity genealogies: David Attenborough, Kristen Scott-Thomas and Ridley Scott
The National Archives is delighted to announce that they will digitise the National Farm Survey (MAF 32 and MAF 73) in full, thanks to a generous grant of £2.13 million from Lund Trust.
The 1941 National Farm Survey is one of the most comprehensive records of land that they hold in their collection and is a window in time on the UK’s agriculture and land use in the middle of the Second World War. Containing extensive data on over 300,000 English and Welsh farms, the survey is among the most-requested record series at The National Archives.
Currently, the complex filing of the paper record makes it difficult for readers to order and use, with the records only available in physical copy. This project will digitise the series in full and create a new digital cataloguing arrangement to make each farm searchable online.
It will not only make the survey permanently and freely available, but will also improve its accessibility and searchability.
Genealogists, family and local historians will be able to consult the series for their own research, and the project will lay the ground for new analyses by historical economists, geographers and ecologists.
Jeff James, CEO & Keeper of The National Archives said:
“This is a unique opportunity to realise the potential of what was seen as a ‘Second Domesday Book’, a ‘permanent and comprehensive record of the conditions on the farms of England and Wales’. Thanks to this partnership, the National Farm Survey, an enormous database of land ownership and land usage in mid-20th century Britain, will be freely available online to researchers in the UK and globally.”
Andrew Wright, Director of Lund Trust said:
“The National Farm Survey was born out of a wartime need decades ago but still has much to teach us about the land. We are pleased to support making these records accessible to help people in England and Wales to know their local areas better and aid scholars researching our rich agrarian history.”
The project began in October 2023 and will finish in March 2027, with teams from across The National Archives working on the conservation, digitisation, transcription, cataloguing, and publishing of the records. More information about the project’s progress and first image release will be published later this year.
About The National Archives
The National Archives is a non-ministerial government department and the official archive for the UK government, and for England and Wales. We look after and make available to the public our collection of historical records dating back more than 1,000 years, including records as diverse as the Domesday Book and MI5 files. We are also a cultural, heritage and academic organisation which promotes public accessibility to iconic documents while ensuring preservation for generations to come.
Lund Trust supports work that greens people’s lives in the UK and also gives to other causes its donors especially care about. Since 2002, it has given more than £107m.
Family history website TheGenealogist has announced today an exciting new feature as part of their powerful Map Explorer™ tool. For the first time, you can explore 1861 census records for England, Scotland and Wales seamlessly connected to contemporary maps with pins revealing the parish, thoroughfare, or even the very building where your ancestor lived. This enhancement adds a fascinating layer to your research and exploration.
Charles Dickens location in the 1861 census displayed on Map Explorer™
Family historians and house historians will now find it easier than ever to locate a person in the official population count from 1861. With one click, you can view a historic map with a pin indicating where a person was living in that year.
You can then go on to see the routes your ancestors would have used to visit shops, local pubs, churches, places of work, schools and parks. You can also find where the nearest railway station was, important for understanding how our ancestors could travel to other parts of the country to see relatives or visit their hometown.
The 1861 Census joins previously released 1871 to 1911 censuses and the 1939 Register, which are all linked to TheGenealogist’s innovative Map Explorer™. This means that with just the click of a button, you can travel in time through 7 decades of records to discover future occupants and see how an area changed.
Most of the Greater London area and other towns and cities can be viewed down to the property level, while other more rural parts of the country can be identified down to the parish, road or street.
Read TheGenealogist’s article: Where the Dickens Are They? to discover more and see an interesting case study:
TheGenealogist is an award-winning online family history website, who put a wealth of information at the fingertips of family historians. Their approach is to bring hard to use physical records to life online with easy to use interfaces such as their Tithe and newly released Lloyd George Domesday collections.
TheGenealogist’s innovative SmartSearch technology links records together to help you find your ancestors more easily. TheGenealogist is one of the leading providers of online family history records. Along with the standard Birth, Marriage, Death and Census records, they also have significant collections of Parish and Nonconformist records, PCC Will Records, Irish Records, Military records, Occupations, Newspaper record collections amongst many others.
TheGenealogist uses the latest technology to help you bring your family history to life. Use TheGenealogist to find your ancestors today!
*Disclosure: Please note, this post contains affiliate links. This does notmean that you pay more, just that I make a percentage on the sales from my links. The payments help me pay for the cost of running the site. You may like to read this explanation here:
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