Here is a new resource that would seem to be quite a useful tool for doing historical research.
www.connectedhistories.org brings together several important resources to search from one place. I can see how it could be used to track down records and to also fill in some background knowledge for people researching their ancestors, even though some of the records are not specifically aimed at family historians.
Including more than two billion words that have been recorded in documents ranging from the 1500s and the start of the 20th century, it has been created by the universities of Hertfordshire, London and Sheffield, taking them 18 months to complete.
While it doesn’t provide online access to any new records, it does allow a researcher to make connections
between multiple data sets that were previously only available separately. One of its good points is that it
makes it easier to track down the names and locations of people who are in records and who, previously,
would have needed to search for using keywords on the websites that it now accesses.
Connectedhistories intends to grow with a major update scheduled for later in the year when the British
Library will upload 65,000 books and thousands of 19th century pamphlets. Currently, with a single search, you gain access to… British History Online, British Museum Images, British Newspapers 1600-1900, Charles Booth Archive, House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera, John Strype’s Survey of London Online, London Lives 1690-1800, the Origins.net and The Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online 1674-1913.
While some of the providers are subscription sites, you do get access to brief extracts from them without
needing a subscription and so this is a useful feature. I shall be looking forward to the update later in the year from Connectedhistories.org.
I commend people, who are researching their family trees, to go and join the Family History Societies for the areas where their ancestors came from. Not the least for the help you can get from these knowledgeable folk.
One of my own areas of interest is Devon and so it was, with much pleasure, that I bumped into the party manning the Devon Family History Society’s stall at the recent Who do You Think You Are? LIVE show.
When I say, bumped into them, it was more like they bumped into me; or at least their visitors did and I do mean this quite literally!
You see, I was volunteering for a few hours each day on the Society of Genealogists book stand at the show. Our area backed on to the Devon FHS stall and as a busy group of people, armed with their computers loaded with data to search for show goers, they had many visitors wanting to sit down with them. This meant that the chairs sometimes strayed into Society of Genealogist’s territory and hence the bumps to the back of mine, and others on the SoG bookstall’s legs and rears!
Now, to show that I certainly took it with good grace, I decided to interview the Chairman of Devon Family History Society, Maureen Selley about a certain interesting aspect to our FHS (yes, I declare an interest, I am a member!) and that is the Acorn Club.
Apart from the fantastic data that the society has, some of which it is now licensed to findmypast.co.uk a rare facility is its pages for young family historians.
I have had two requests this week, from different people, asking me how do they trace a “lost” relative.
I am making an assumption that they are both reasonably certain that the person is still alive. They have probably checked the index to death registers to make sure that this is the case and that the person in question hasn’t passed away.
If you are in this position, but haven’t ascertained if your relative has died then the first thing to do is to take a look at the U.K. Death Record Indexes. These can be found online, up to 2005, on sites such as Ancestry.co.uk, TheGenealogist.co.uk and GenesReunited.co.uk ,while FindMyPast.co.uk has them up to 2006.
If you don’t find them in these databases then next you need to search between 2006 and the present. The bad news is that these records are not online. Here is some information published on the direct.gov.uk website that I have copied below for its usefulness if you are not confining yourself to web based research:
“Copies of the indexes can no longer be purchased but a complete set, including ‘Births, Deaths and Marriages from 1837 – 2008’, ‘Overseas from 1761 – 2008’, ‘Civil Partnerships from 2005 – 2009’, ‘Adoptions from 1927 – 2009’, and the provisional indexes for ‘Births and Deaths from 2009 to June 2010′, are available at:
Manchester City Library
Birmingham Central Library
Bridgend Reference and Information Library
Plymouth Central Library
City of Westminster Archives Centre
London Metropolitan Archives
The British Library*
These locations get updates for you to view in person. This is expected to continue until free, online access can be provided.
* Please be aware that customers will need to undertake a pre-registration process. Two forms of identification showing a signature and proof of address will be needed to gain entry into this location.”
So, assuming that you have not found a death, then the next thing I would do is to look at using 192.com. It can be a useful start in tracking down someone still living.
A cousin of mine was able to trace another of our cousins using this site with just the lost person’s names and the fact we knew they had lived in Southampton. It does involve you having to contact several people with the same name to try and rule them out.
Finally, a good guide to tracing living people is this one from the British Library.
That great institution, The British Library, is joining up with family history website findmypast.co.uk in a project that I find exciting, as some of my Scots ancestors went out to British India to find their fortunes in the 1860s, while others stayed put in the UK.
What has been announced, by these organisations, is their intention to digitise a veritable treasure trove of family history resources held by the British Library and so making them available to us online and fully searchable for the first time.
To be scanned are the United Kingdom electoral registers that span the century which followed on from the Reform Act of 1832, along with records of baptisms, marriages and burials that have been drawn from the archives of the India Office.
These collections are going to allow us the possibility of tracking down details of our forebears from our computers instead of making a trip to London and the British Library’s Reading Rooms.
The British Library houses the national collection of electoral registers covering the whole of the United Kingdom and contain a vast range of names, addresses and other genealogical information, so you can see their importance.
“Digitisation of the electoral registers will transform the work of people wishing to use them for family history research,†said Jennie Grimshaw, the Library’s curator for Social Policy and Official Publications. “Printed electoral registers are arranged by polling district within constituency and names are not indexed, so the process of finding an address to confirm names of residents is currently incredibly laborious. Digitisation represents a huge breakthrough as users will be able to search for names and addresses, thereby pinpointing the individuals and ancestors they’re looking for.â€
Also to look forward to, in this large-scale digitisation, are records taken from the archives of the East India Company and the India Office and thus my excitement as so many of my Scottish ancestors were employed in the H.E.I.C.S. The data that we are promised relate to Britons who lived and worked in the Indian sub-continent during the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, up to Independence in 1948. Including over 1,000 volumes of births, marriages and burials, together with applications for civil and military service, and details of pension payments to individuals.
Antonia Moon, curator of post-1858 India Office Records said, “These records are an outstanding resource for researchers whose ancestors had connections with British India, whether as servants of the administration or as private inhabitants.â€
We can expect to see five million pages of UK electoral registers and India Office records digitised over the next year. The resources will become available via findmypast.co.uk and in the British Library’s Reading Rooms from early 2012; online access will be available to findmypast.co.uk subscribers and pay-as-you-go customers – access to users in the British Library Reading Rooms will be free.
Simon Bell, the British Library’s Head of Licensing and Product Development, said: “We are delighted to announce this exciting new partnership between the British Library and findmypast.co.uk , which will deliver an online and fully searchable resource that will prove immensely valuable to family history researchers in unlocking a treasure trove of content that up to now has only been available either on microfilm or within the pages of bound volumes. The Library will receive copies of the digitised images created for this project, so as well as transforming access for current researchers, we will also retain digital versions of these collections in perpetuity, for the benefit of future researchers.â€
Elaine Collins, Commercial Director at findmypast.co.uk, said: “We’re very excited to be involved with this fascinating project. The electoral rolls are the great missing link for family historians: after censuses and civil registration indexes, they provide the widest coverage of the whole population. To have Irish and Scottish records alongside England and Wales is also a huge advantage. These records will join the 1911 Census, Chelsea Pensioner Service Records and many more datasets available online at findmypast.co.uk, which enable people to make fantastic discoveries day after day.â€
Recently I have seen that Ancestry.co.uk has launched on-line the Land Tax Valuations from 1910 London. Now we all know that property goes up and down, with most home owners expecting that the long term trend is up. Well this data collection reveals that the historic values of some of the capital’s most famous streets and landmarks from just over a century ago and no surprises that they were lower then than they are today.
Originally the records were compiled in 1910, from across the UK as part of David Lloyd George’s 1910 Finance Act and later refereed to as the ‘Domesday Survey’. The reason behind the government gathering this information was as a means to redistribute wealth through the assessment of land value.
What do the records contain for family historians? There is a listing of the owners and occupiers of the properties and it includes the address, value and annual rental yield for the properties in London in the early 20th century.
The average 1910 property could be purchased for a price tag of just £14,000, it would seem – almost 3,000 per cent less than today.
Of particular interest are the values of famous landmarks included in the collection. The Bank of England; worth a mere £110,000 in 1910, the Old Bailey; worth just £6,600, and Mansion House; which contrastingly was valued at an impressive £992,000. St Paul’s Cathedral also features, but without a valuation as it is listed as ‘exempt’ from tax.
Perhaps more surprising is that the media-hub Fleet Street, was then home to numerous newspapers from outside of London including the Liverpool Courier, Yorkshire Evening News and the Newcastle Chronicle! A property on Fleet Street cost an average of £25,000 in 1910, compared to £1.2 million today.
The records provide us with a valuable snapshot of the ownership of land at the beginning of the 20th century. It may help those with ancestors who appear in the collection to find out more about their forebears respective financial situations and the lives they led a hundred years ago.
Ancestry.co.uk International Content Director Dan Jones, whom I interviewed recently at Who Do You Think You Are? Live about their website, comments: “These records are especially useful as a census substitute for people tracing their London ancestors who may not have been captured in the England and Wales 1911 Census.
“The collection offers a fascinating insight into our capital at the beginning of the 20th century – a time when Britain was on the verge of major social, political and economic change.â€
The collection complements the extensive census records, ranging from 1841 to 1901, already online at Ancestry.co.uk.
I’ve just spent an enjoyable hour or so browsing on-line the Post Office Directories for Scotland back in the 1820s!
As some of you, that have been reading my blog for a while, may recall I have a line in my family tree that is from East Lothian in Scotland. One of my ancestors, a Charles Hay, moved to the Scottish capital city from Dunbar, where he had been a merchant and later the Provost.
In his will, which I downloaded from the Scotlandspeople.gov.uk website, he lived until his death in Great King Street, Edinburgh and became a merchant in that city. So it was interesting to me to find that The National Library of Scotland has made available on line 287 historic Scottish Post Office Directories with the promise of many more to come.
The books cover most of Scotland from 1774 until 1911 with particular emphasis on Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow.
The project is ongoing, with an expected completion in the summer of 2011 when over 600 directories will be available for us to browse.
The books, being made available with the co-operation of Scottish libraries, are being scanned in conjunction with the Internet Archive (www.archive.org) and you can search the books on-line or even download a pdf from the National Library of Scotland website:
Given that a lot of Jersey records are in French, and we have our own legal system, you may find yourself coming across unfamiliar terminology. If you have ever wondered what a Procureur is, or the significance of Muratti, or why we spell rent with an extra “e†on the end, take a look at the Jerripedia. It’s a wiki – it uses the same sort of software as the well-known Wikipedia, but the content is specifically related to Jersey. It’s not a complete resource, but more information is being added to it every day. And if you have information you think you could add, it’s very easy to get an account and put it out there.
There is also the Jersey Archive’s online public access catalogue (hereafter the Jersey OPAC). This is only an index to the documents the Archive holds, but for all that it can give some very useful ways into families. The largest document set in it is the 30000-plus identity cards issues by the German occupation forces in 1941 – and these have addresses, names and dates of birth. The data isn’t absolutely accurate (I have found a card alleging the holder was born on 31st June), but the Germans were generally pretty meticulous. One other thing: if you find an identity card, you can guarantee the person was alive until May 1945 (cards were collected from the deceased and destroyed).
Running a name search in the Jersey OPAC is a lucky dip exercise – you can’t be sure what you will find. You might find records of a will – and that will have a date when it was enacted, which is a helpful guideline to where to start looking for a death. You might find property transactions, or names entered in school logbooks, or possibly baptisms (there is an online listing of 19th century baptisms in the parish church of St Helier). Again, more is steadily being added to the catalogue: volunteers are currently indexing the names of everyone admitted to the hospital in the mid-19th century, and all the recorded cases of people who died intestate up to about 1948 should be on the OPAC soon.
Now here is a very special interview for you from my trip to the Who Do You Think You Are? LIVE show at the end of February.
I was on my way to The Society of Genealogists stand, where I was volunteering on the second hand book stall as a way of giving something back to the SoG, when I spotted the well respected genealogist and author Anthony Adolph. He was taking questions from show-goers on the stand of the “Your Family Tree Magazine”, a publication for which he writes articles on surname research.
As a shareholder in an independent bookshop I am also aware of Anthony Adolph as an author of several books, including Full of Soup and Gold: The life of Henry Jermyn and many titles on family history.
He was gracious enough to give me a wonderful interview that began by reassuring me and my blog readers/ YouTube Channel viewers, that “we have all reached points in our family trees where we are stuck.” He revealed that he has been tracing his own family tree for getting on for thirty years now. “First of all as a complete and utter amateur, as a schoolboy, ” Mr Adolph said, “and then later on I became a professional.”
Giving some hope, to all those of us who find we are facing a brick wall, he charmingly admits that, just like everyone else, at the beginning of each of his family lines he is completely stuck.
The interview then goes on to touch on the four techniques for getting further back:
Oral History
Paper based
Surnames
DNA.
Anthony Adolph then reveals that he has become quite passionate about the latter and how DNA in genealogy enabled him to discover that the “cap” to his family tree was unusual. It seems that the Haplogroup, from which he descends from the genetic Adam and Eve, is G and so from Armenia, Georgia and Turkey. This is in contrast to the fact that most men in Europe are from group R.
I see that the British Record Society (BRS) Probate Record Collection has gone live on the National Wills Index.
Its a collection that covers more than 500 years and if your ancestor had written a will then perhaps this will make it a bit easier for you to find them. What is important about this release is that much of the data can not be found elsewhere on line and so the release on British Origins (www.origins.net) is to be welcomed.
These BRS probate indexes give you the names and dates of several million wills and other probate documents. It has a search facility that allows the user to view images of the original indexes to find all the information that you need to locate the documents in record offices.
In the future, as the BRS volumes are gradually indexed and uploaded, users will be able to order hard copies of the wills online. and they even promise that eventually we will be able to access the documents thenselves.
While at the Who Do You Think You Are? Live show last week I was so glad to get to talk to Nigel Bayley of one of the UK’s most important look up websites TheGenealogist.co.uk.
Nigel kindly explains about the new search facility that they have recently introduced and also about some of the new data bases that have come on line at the subscription site.
Nigel Bayley Managing Director of The Genealogist.co.uk
www.connectedhistories.org brings together several important resources to search from one place. I can see how it could be used to track down records and to also fill in some background knowledge for people researching their ancestors, even though some of the records are not specifically aimed at family historians.
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