London Metropolitan Archives

Now you can explore London’s rich history through the lives of your ancestors with the launch of these fascinating historical records at Ancestry.co.uk

The records range from the early 1900s all the way back to the 1500s – around 300 years before Civil Registration. So they can help you go beyond Census, Birth, Marriage & Death records.  Currently released is Board of Guardians Deaths and Burials collection 1834-1906; and Births and Baptisms 1834-1934.

There are more than 77 million records in total, which will be released regularly over the next year or so. You’ll be able to see records first-hand such as parish records, non-conformist registers, electoral registers, parish poor records, boards of guardians, wills, transportation sessions – and much more. Watch out for more releases soon.

About LMA

London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) is the archive repository for many London-wide organisations and is the largest local authority record office in the UK.

The archives of the City of London Corporation (COL) and the former Greater London Council (GLC), London County Council (LCC), Middlesex County Council (MCC) and their predecessors are held there. LMA also holds records for many religious, public, business, local authority and other organisations based in London. The dates of items that can be found there range from medieval to the present day, and their collections are constantly expanding. At the moment, there are documents to fill around 72 km worth of archives – an enormous amount of information about the capital and its people. This material dates from 1067 to 2006 and is an important part of London life, its past, present and future.

From Ancestry.com

At the end of January Ancestry.com made 134 million General Records Office (GRO) UK birth records for England and Wales dating from 1837 to 2005 available online for the first time, fully searchable by name, registration date and district. This was done as an update to the existing England & Wales Birth Index collection.

Many of you may be familiar with the previous GRO Birth Index that was indexed by surname range only. A search would produce a list of all pages on which the searched name might appear, but referenced by the first and last name on those pages only. Now, every name in the GRO Birth Index is individually searchable. 

The newly updated Birth Index is comprised of only two separate collections instead of the three collections that existed previously. The England & Wales, FreeBMD Birth Index, 1837-1915 includes births registered from 1837 to 1915 and was keyed by FreeBMD, a group of independent volunteers dedicated to transcribing civil registration indexes of birth, marriage and death records for England and Wales.

The second, England & Wales, Birth Index, 1916-2005, includes the birth index from 1916 to 1983, which has been transcribed by Ancestry.com, and the GRO published index from 1984 to 2005. Images of the index are only available up to 1983.

We are currently working to also fully index the GRO Marriage and Death indexes. When complete, more than 250 million individual birth, marriage and death (BMD) records will be searchable. As ‘core’ record sets, this major enhancement to Ancestry’s BMD collection will be of great benefit to all UK family history researchers.

From Simon Orde, Family Historian designer

We previously estimated that version 4 of Family Historian would be ready in February. We have had to revise our estimates and now expect it to be ready in March. We apologise for the delay.

Royal Marines records available online and free at SoG Library. TNA announced on 8 January 2009 that the service registers of some 110,000 seamen who joined the Royal Marines between 1842 and 1936 are now available to search and download from Documents Online which can be searched and downloaded free at the SOG. You can search under surname, forename, register number and date of enlistment, and may uncover the names of ships and shore stations served on, details of conduct, medal entitlement and much more.

The new series of Who Do You Think You Are? will now begin at 9pm on BBC One on Monday 2 February, the BBC has announced. The series was originally reported to start on Wednesday 4 February, but the BBC has since announced changes to the schedule. The impressionist Rory Bremner will kick-off the much-anticipated new series by delving into his family’s fascinating military past. Newsreader Fiona Bruce will trace her Scottish roots a week later. The series will also feature chef Rick Stein, actress Zoë Wanamaker, and actor Kevin Whately.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/whodoyouthinkyouare/

If you’ve got Irish ancestors, you might be interested in knowing that the Irish Civil Registration Indexes from 1845-1958 are now online at Family Search.

The following announcement was written by the Guild of One-Name Studies:

Prospective students can pay and enroll via the Pharos website – www.pharostutors.com at a price of £42.99. The Guild of One-Name Studies will also be offering free membership to the Guild for the remainder of the financial year for all non-Guild members who sign up for this course.

The course is suitable for all genealogists who have an interesting or unusual surname, or who wish to research their surname in greater depth.  It will also be of significant interest to existing one-namers.  

Helen Osborn, Managing Director of Pharos Teaching and Tutoring Ltd, said today

Cliff Kemball, Guild Treasurer & project mentor for Pharos courses, said today: 

Family Pursuit announced the following yesterday:

Provo, Utah, Jan. 14 – Family Pursuit, a leader in online collaborative genealogy research tools, today announced the release of Private Family Trees. Designed specifically for collaboration, this unique wiki-based website is now available for private use for the genealogist who is looking for a better way to work with others. Family Pursuit’s private family trees allow researchers to share not only conclusions, but their ongoing research, sources, extractions and theories with those invited to join the trees. They are the perfect solution for sharing research with the entire family, interacting with other family genealogists, or working within a family organization or one-name study.

Some of the collaborative tools available for private family trees include:

• Inviting an unlimited number of family members to join a private tree
• Organizing and sharing ongoing genealogy research
• Creating and assigning tasks
• Sharing research logs and extractions
• Adding living individuals
• Keeping all information about living and deceased individuals private
• Involving and mentoring family members
• Participating in family discussions
• Receiving notifications of changes made by tree users
• Rolling back and forth any change made by any user
• Advanced merging and unmerging

Along with these new private trees, Family Pursuit continues to offer its Community Tree which has been created for genealogists to share research with the genealogy community to reduce duplicate efforts, accelerate research, and network and connect with distant relatives.

“We have found that many genealogists feel more comfortable working privately with those they already know. A Private Family Tree offers this security,” said Mike Martineau, founder of Family Pursuit. “When genealogists feel confident in their research conclusions, they will be able to easily copy their conclusions to the Community Tree for others to view and add to. A Private Family Tree also allows the inexperienced genealogist to be privately mentored by more knowledgeable relatives. We are excited to offer a bridge between those who are overwhelmed by the amount of research and those who want to help but don’t know how. We look forward to continuing our progress in developing these important tools, and being a part of bringing more people into the work.”

About Family Pursuit

Started in 2004, Family Pursuit, a Provo, Utah company, provides web-based applications to accelerate family history work by providing a framework for genealogy researchers to work together in their efforts and to easily share their ideas, theories, research and conclusions. Family Pursuit enables genealogy enthusiasts to involve family members who have never engaged in family history work, bringing families together in sharing the rewarding experience of researching, exploring, and creating a personal understanding of their heritage. Visit www.familypursuit.com for more information.

For a few days over the Christmas period, FindMyPast.com in association with The National Archives made parts of the UK 1911 census available to its customers on its website www.1911census.co.uk.  This was a teasing introduction to the official launch on 13th January 2009.  

It is exciting for genealogists that this census has been made available earlier than usual but not all of the scanning of the census returns has been completed yet.  They hope it will be by the summer.

It is expected that the website will be very busy at first, and FindMyPast have taken a number of measures to make sure that as many people as possible can get their searches completed successfully including restricting some search functions and only allowing census pages to be downloaded rather than viewed directly on the site.  You will need to purchase credits to view the results of your census searches.

Counties available at launch:

Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Cheshire, Cornwall, Derbyshire, Devon, Dorset, Essex, Gloucestershire, Hampshire, Herefordshire, Hertfordshire, Huntingdonshire, Kent, Lancashire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, London, Middlesex, Norfolk, Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Rutlandshire, Shropshire, Somersetshire, Staffordshire, Suffolk, Surrey, Sussex, Warwickshire, Wiltshire, Worcestershire, Yorkshire West Riding

Counties not available for launch but coming soon:

England:
Durham
Cumberland 
Northumberland
Westmorland
Yorkshire – East Riding and North Riding

Wales:
Anglesey
Brecknockshire
Carnarvonshire
Cardiganshire
Carmarthenshire
Denbighshire
Flintshire
Glamorgan
Merionethshire
Montgomeryshire
Monmouthshire
Pembrokeshire
Radnorshire

Other:
Isle of Man
Channel Islands
Royal Navy
Overseas Military Establishments

About the 1911 census

The 1911 census for England and Wales was taken on the night of Sunday 2 April, 1911. The count included all individual households, plus institutions such as prisons, workhouses, naval vessels and merchant vessels, and it also attempted to make an approximate count of the homeless.

What is in the 1911 census?

In common with the censuses that preceded it, it recorded the following information:

• Where an individual lived
• Their age at the time of the census
• Who (what relatives) they were living with
• Their place of birth
• Occupation

Also, depending on an individual’s circumstances, additional information could include:

• Who their guests were on the night of the census
• The number of servants they had (if any)
• Whether they were an employee or employer
• Details of nationality
• Duration of current marriage

In response to government concerns the 1911 census also asked additional, more specific questions to each household, about fertility in marriage and occupational data.

Prior to 1911, the household schedules were destroyed once the details had been transferred into the enumerators’ summary books. But for the 1911 census both sets of records have been preserved, which means you can see the census documents filled out in your ancestor’s own hand (complete with mistakes and additional comments), in addition to the edited version in the enumerators’ summary.

At launch the household schedules (original household pages), plus their transcriptions are available. The enumerators’ summary books will go online six to eight weeks after launch.

The 1911 census and the suffragettes

Frustrated with the government’s refusal to grant women the vote, a large number of women boycotted the 1911 census by refusing to be counted.

There were two forms of protest. In the first, the women (or their husband) refused to fill in the form, often recording their protest to the enumerator. In the second, women evaded the census by staying away from their home for the whole night.

In both cases, any details relating to individual women in the households will be missing from the census.

For the family historian the active refusal to fill in the form (accompanied by a protest statement) at least registers the presence of a woman/women in the household, whereas the women who evaded the count are simply untraceable via the census.

The exact number of women who boycotted the census is not known, though some people have estimated that it may be as many as several thousand.

Ancestry UK has published The UK Medical Registers provided in association with the General Medical Council. This database contains annually published books listing all of the names of doctors who were licensed to practise in the United Kingdom and abroad from 1859-1959. Also included are foreign doctors who qualified in Britain. Although these books were published annually, registers have only been digitised on 4 year intervals.  This database contains images of original records.