Over 3.5 million individuals added to TheGenealogist’s Residential and Trade Directories Collection

Disclosure: Please note this post contains affiliate links.*

NEWS:  Press release from TheGenealogist*

 

TheGenealogist is delighted to announce the release of a comprehensive collection of 1930-35 directories. This addition features 3.5 million individuals, providing genealogy enthusiasts with an unparalleled opportunity to trace their ancestors and explore family histories during the first half of this transformative decade of the 1930s.

The newly available directories offer information on individuals, businesses, and localities, making it easier than ever to uncover the lives of your ancestors.

Lyndhurst High Street can be found in Kelly's Directory of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, 1931
Lyndhurst High Street can be found in Kelly’s Directory of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, 1931

Key Features and Benefits:

      • Rich Detail and Coverage: With over 3.5 million listings, these directories provide details about individuals’ professions, addresses, and local businesses, offering a snapshot of life in the first half of the 1930s.
      • Geographical Diversity: The collection covers various regions, including Sussex, Warwickshire, Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Dorsetshire, Hertfordshire, Kent, Westmorland, Leicestershire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, and many more, extending even to the Channel Islands, Malta and New Zealand.
      • Enhanced Research Capabilities: Researchers can delve into trade directories and phone books to uncover ancestors’ occupations, residences, and social engagements, providing a holistic view of their lives.

Why the 1930s Matter:

The 1930s, also known as the Great Slump, was a period of economic and social upheaval. Understanding how your ancestors navigated these challenging times can provide profound insights into your family’s resilience and adaptability. These directories are a treasure trove for anyone looking to connect with their past and understand their heritage in the context of broader historical events.

Supporting Your Journey:

TheGenealogist is committed to making your research journey as smooth and rewarding as possible. Our platform offers a suite of tools and resources, including expert articles, video tutorials, and a dedicated customer support team, ensuring that users can effectively use these newly released directories.

Read TheGenealogist’s article, The Unlikely Hero of the Track and Battlefield:
https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2024/shooting-for-gold-and-glory-the-unstoppable-philip-neame-7532/


To celebrate this latest release, TheGenealogist is offering its 12 months Diamond Package for just £99.95 – that’s over £40 off!

To find out more and claim the offer, visit: https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/MGBDIR724

Expires on 26th October 2024.

This offer includes a lifetime discount! Your subscription will renew at with £20 off every year you stay with us.

This includes the following:-
Subscription to Discover Your Ancestors Online Magazine (Worth £24.99)


 

Directories included in this release are:

    • Kelly’s Directory of Bedfordshire and Huntingdonshire, 1931
    • Kelly’s Directory of Bournemouth, Poole, Parkstone, Christchurch &c., 1932
    • Kelly’s Directory of Brighton and Hove, 1932
    • Kelly’s Directory of Cambridgeshire, 1933
    • Kelly’s Directory of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, 1932
    • Kelly’s Directory of Devonshire and Cornwall, 1930
    • Kelly’s Directory of Dorsetshire, 1931
    • Kelly’s Directory of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, 1931
    • Kelly’s Directory of Hertfordshire, 1933
    • Kelly’s Directory of Ipswich and Neighbourhood, 1930
    • Kelly’s Directory of Kent, 1930
    • Kelly’s Directory of Kent, 1934
    • Kelly’s Directory of Kilburn Willesden, 1933
    • Kelly’s Directory of Leicestershire & Rutland, 1932
    • Kelly’s Directory of Norfolk and Suffolk, 1933
    • Kelly’s Directory of Putney & Roehampton, 1930
    • Kelly’s Directory of Somersetshire, Gloucestershire & the City of Bristol, 1931
    • Kelly’s Directory of Suffolk, 1933
    • Kelly’s Directory of Sussex, Chichester, Selsey and Neighbourhood, 1934
    • Kelly’s Directory of the Channel Islands, 1931
    • Kelly’s Directory of Warwick, Leamington Spa, Stratford-On-Avon and Kenilworth, 1932
    • Kelly’s Directory of Warwickshire, 1932
    • Kelly’s Directory of Westmorland, 1934
    • Kelly’s Directory of Wiltshire, 1931
    • Malta Telephone Directory, 1933
    • New Zealand Post Office Directory, 1934
    • Nottingham, Leicester and Derby Telephone Directory, 1934
    • Nottingham, Lincoln, Peterborough and Districts Telephone Directory, 1933
    • Ward’s Directory of Whitley Bay, Tynemouth, North and South Shields, Jarrow, Wallsend, Gosforth, Newcastle-on-Tyne and Adjacent Villages, 1934

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 not mean 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:

http://paidforadvertising.co.uk/

 

Send to Kindle

TheGenealogist adds the 1939 Register with SmartSearch

Disclosure: Please note this post contains affiliate links.*

Latest News:

 

TheGenealogist have now added the 1939 Register to their site and it comes with SmartSearch

TheGenealogist has released the 1939 Register, adding their unique and powerful search tools and SmartSearch technology. This offers a hugely flexible way to look for your ancestors at the start of the Second World War.

TheGenealogist’s well known brick wall shattering search tools include the ability to find your ancestor in 1939 by using keywords, such as the individual’s occupation or their date of birth. You can also search for an address and then jump straight to the household. If you’re struggling to find a family, you can even search using as many of their forenames as you know.

Once you’ve found a record in the 1939 Register, you can click on the street name to view all the residents on the street, potentially finding relatives living nearby.

TheGenealogist’s innovative SmartSearch technology enables you to discover even more about a person, linking to their Birth, Marriage and Death records.

1939 evacuees
1939 saw the evacuation of thousands of children

The 1939 Register can often reveal to you important additional information about your ancestors that will help build your family’s story. The powerful keyword search can find evacuees by searching for their name and date of birth along with the keyword “evacuee”. The fact individuals are listed with their full dates of birth is a huge benefit that the 1939 Register has over the census, which simply lists the age of a person. 

Take your research journey quickly forwards by using TheGenealogist’s innovative SmartSearch to jump to a person’s

      • Birth Record
      • Marriage Record
      • Death Record

TheGenealogist makes searching the 1939 Register more flexible. Search by

      • Name (Including wildcards, e.g. Win* Church*)
      • Address (e.g. Whitehall) 
      • Keywords (e.g. Admiralty)
      • First names from a family group (e.g. Winston, Clementine)

See TheGenealogist’s article on finding the highest paid Film Star and Entertainer of the time, George Formby:

https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2021/a-window-on-september-1939-and-george-formby-the-entertainer-1398/

 

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 linksThis does not mean 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:

http://paidforadvertising.co.uk

Send to Kindle

Take your research back before the census with the latest release from TheGenealogist

Disclosure: Please note this post contains affiliate links.*

 

NEWS:

TheGenealogist has released a collection of searchable Early Trade and Residential Directories that cover the years 1816-1839 to help find ancestors in the period before the usable census records begin.

Prior to 1841 all of the U.K. censuses were generally statistical: that is, mainly headcounts, with virtually no personal information such as names recorded and so family history researchers need to turn to a substitute to find out the address where their ancestors had lived. Trade and Residential Directories list names of tradespeople, prominent citizens and in some cases other residents of a town as well.

The-City-from-Bankside-by-Thomas-Miles-Richardson-c-1820

The City from Bankside by Thomas Miles Richardson, c.1820

 

Many of these directories will also give a good description of the town or area which can give family historians an interesting insight into the social history of their ancestors’ locality at the time. This information usually includes the main industry, topographical details, communication links with the surrounding towns by stage coach or railway, and details of local administration offices, post offices, the clergy, charities hospitals and schools.

These directory records have been digitised by TheGenealogist and made searchable by name, so they can help researchers to find their ancestors in the Georgian and very early Victorian period.

The early Trade and Residential Directories being released in this batch include volumes that cover the areas of Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Cornwall, Derby, Devonshire, Dorsetshire, Durham, Essex, Glasgow, Hampshire, London, Liverpool, Middlesex, Northumberland, Norfolk, Nottinghamshire and Suffolk.

List of Directories in this release:

Derby 1829 History, Gazetteer and Directory; Devonshire 1830 Pigot’s Directory; Durham 1828 White’s Directory; Essex 1832-1833 Pigot’s Directory; Glasgow 1831-1832 Post Office Directory; Lincolnshire 1826/7 Directory; Liverpool 1816 Gore’s Directory; London 1816 Post Office Directory; London 1819 Robson’s Directory; London 1822 Post Office Directory; London and Provincial 1823-1824 New Commercial Pigot Directory; London 1824 Post Office Directory; London 1826 Post Office Directory; London 1828 Robson’s Commercial Directory; London 1829 Robson’s Trades Directory; London 1831 Post Office Directory; London 1833 Robson’s Directory; London 1836 Post Office Directory; London 1837 Post Office Directory; London 1839 Post Office Directory; Norfolk 1830 Pigot’s Directory; Northumberland 1828 White’s Directory; Nottinghamshire 1832 White’s Directory; Suffolk 1830 Pigot’s Directory.

 

Find out more about directories and how they can help you research your ancestors on TheGenealogist here:

TheGenealogist.co.uk – Directories

 

*Disclosure: Please note this post contains affiliate links. This does not mean 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:

http://paidforadvertising.co.uk/

Send to Kindle

Who Do You Think You Are? Live 2014

 

Who Do You Think You Are? Live

Its here!

The largest family history show in the world!

 

This week (Thursday 20th, Friday 21st and Saturday 22nd) Who Do You Think You Are? Live comes to Olympia with stands from all the major genealogical websites, family history suppliers, expert advice, talks from celebrities from the TV programme and a myriad of workshops.

The Nosey Genealogist will be there too on stand 56 showcasing our Family History Researcher Beginners English & Welsh Family History Course. As a special show offer we have re-introduced the popular £1 trial membership of our course that gives you two weeks lessons and some free bonus content.

To take advantage of this either come along to our stall, number 56 on the ground floor, or head over to our special trial webpage at http://www.familyhistoryresearcher.com/WDYTYAcomp/

The Nosey Genealogists has gathered together in one fixed-term-membership site a collection of 52 weekly lessons that will aid the beginner in English & Welsh family history to become a more knowledgeable researcher.

Also of great value to the more advanced, the course explores the different resources, data sets and documents that can reveal more about your English or Welsh ancestors.

 Nick Thorne

Written from the practical point of view by Nick Thorne, an advanced beginner (as even the most experienced researcher is always learning more) and, with the aid of some lessons penned by professional genealogists, this course is delivered by email to your inbox to do at your own pace.

 

Topics covered in the 12 months include:

  • The census collections
  • The Parish records
  • The Parish Chest
  • Dade Registers
  • County Record offices and what valuable treasures they contain
  • Nonconformist
  • Religious records
  • Clandestine marriages
  • City and Town Directories
  • Census substitutes
  • Apprentices
  • Professionals
  • Army
  • Royal Navy
  • RAF
  • Merchant Navy
  • Illegitimacy
  • The Workhouse
  • Poor Law
  • Death records
  • Burial
  • Wills
  • Rural ancestors
  • Bankrupts
  • Black sheep
  • Genetics and DNA
  • Occupations
  • Maps and Charts
  • The National Archives
  • Other depositories
  • Family Search Centres
  • Passports
  • Manorial records
  • Newspapers
  • and more!

 

If you are attending the show then do please come over and say hello and tell us that you read this blog. You will then be able to enter our competition to win a free copy of our next product due out soon!

 

WDYTYA?LIVE Olympia 2010

Send to Kindle

Researching Scottish and Irish Ancestors

 

I’ve notice in my post bag a few of my correspondents asking for help with Scottish and Irish Ancestor research. For some it would seem that all the advice is very English centric and so today I thought I’d write a short piece for those beginning to look in Scotland and Ireland.

Scotland, in comparison to England, can be a simpler place to look for vital records because of the long established Scotlandspeople website that allows us to browse for records for free and then download the image on a pay as you go basis. You can, therefore, get access to not only the Scottish census records, but also Scottish wills, birth certificates and death certificates.

The Statutory Index, on this site, has entries from the indexes to the civil registers of births, deaths and marriages for all of Scotland, as far back as 1855 up until 2009.

The Old Parish Register Index, on the other hand, contains the entries of births & baptisms, banns & marriages and deaths/burials from the church  registers of some 900 parishes of the Church of Scotland from between 1553  and up to 1854.

The Census Indexes are name indexes to the 1841, 1851, 1861, 1871, 1881, 1891, 1901and 1911 censuses for all of Scotland. You will be able to find that each index entry will list the surname, forename, sex, age, registration district and county of the people of this part of the U.K. while the 1881 census index entries additionally contain the address.

The wills and testaments index, that can also be accessed here, contain over 611,000 index entries to Scottish wills and testaments dating from 1513 to 1901. Each index entry lists the surname, forename, title, occupation and place of residence (at least where they have been given) of the deceased person, with the additional information of the court in which the testament was recorded, along with the date.

The Coats of Arms Index, is another database on the Scotlandspeople website and this contains entries from the Public Register of All Arms and Bearings in Scotland from 1672 to 1907. Each index entry lists the full name, date on which the arms were granted, and the volume and page number in the register.

A point to remember, when researching in Scottish old parish records, is that the Established Church north of the border is the Church of Scotland. As a Presbyterian denomination they do not have Bishops and hence, unlike in England, there are no Bishop’s transcripts to act as a back up should you not find the record you are looking for in the parish register.

Kirk Session Records are the equilavent of the Parish Vestry records south of the border and these are all digitised and made available in Scotland at county record offices with the plan to have them online in the future at Scotlandspeople.

Scottish marriages can be of interest to English families whose ancestors ran away to partake in an irregular border marriage when Lord Hardwicks Marriage Act of 1753 compelled English marriages to be in Church of England churches unless it was a Quaker or Jewish marriage. In Scotland a couple could declare themselves to be married and to find a pdf on the extent of irregular marriages and where the current location of the records are, visit www.gro-scotland.gov.uk.

 

For Irish ancestors www.rootsireland.ie is a good place to start your research, while www.irishgenealogy.ie has coverage of other counties.

It is often said that Irish Family Tree research is very difficult and time-consuming and one of the main reasons is that there are a lack of records. One major missing plank is the lack of any complete Census records before 1901.

For this reason any records that have data within them which had been taken from the Irish Census are obviously of vital importance in Irish ancestral research.  One such source of this data is the Old Age Pension Claim Forms held in the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland (P.R.O.N.I). These give researchers absolutely essential information from the 1841 & 1851 censuses for Northern Ireland & Co. Donegal. Similar records are held by the National Archives in Dublin. These here are referred to as Census Search Forms and they contain the same essential information as the Northern Irish ones but cover the whole of Ireland, including some additional records for Northern Ireland

Researchers from www.ireland-genealogy.com have spent two decades transcribing these hand-written pension claim/census search forms. In some cases they are difficult to read and are in no particular order while the records held by P.R.O.N.I. are not indexed.

Their database allows a researcher online to search these records easily and so will save you both time and money. All you need to do is enter the surname you are researching and from the list provided decide which records you think relate to your family and then just click the order button.

As they point out on their site, these  records were hand written, and so in many cases the handwriting is very difficult to decipher; this coupled with the fact that much if it was written in pencil resulting in some words or letters having faded before the transfer to microfilm, has made the job of transcribing particularly difficult. Ireland-Genealogy.com  have not corrected spelling mistakes nor have their transcribers tried to amend anything that may not make sense. They have simply transcribed all of the information contained on each form. When they were in any doubt about whether or not they were reading a particularly untidy or faded record correctly they have put a question mark. A question mark has also been used when it was impossible to read.

Findmypast.ie

Recently we have had the very welcome addition of Findmypast.ie to the family history fold. This site collects together birth, marriage and death records and so features details of over 400,000 births, baptisms, marriages, deaths and burials from Ireland covering the whole island of Ireland and include over 150,000 newspaper obituaries and four indexes to wills, dating back as far as the 13th century. Many of these records are particularly interesting as they include more than just names, they also feature addresses and occupations. Vital records often make the best starting point for researching your Irish family history.

At findmypast.ie they have almost 150,000 names in census substitutes to help you fill in those missing gaps from the destruction of the census. You’ll find fragments dating from 1749 to 1901, as well as 19th century electoral registers. Anyone researching their 19th century Dublin ancestors will find a wealth of information in the 1851 Dublin City Census, which includes names and address of approximately 59,000 heads of households. We can also access the 1749 Census of Elphin, which lists all households, names of household heads, their addresses, occupations, numbers of children, adults and servants, by age and religious denomination – a remarkable document for such an early date. The Dublin City Census 1901: Rotunda Ward details 13,556 people residing in 1,334 properties across a 67-street space of the Rotunda Ward area of the city.

There are many other data sets including Land and Estate, Court and Legal, Military and Rebellion, Travel and Migration along with Directories dating back to 1814.

Take a look at this great website now by clicking the image below. (This is a compensated affiliate link.)



Send to Kindle