Sources

I have used a number of online resources to explore the people, places and events in my family history. Those I have used the most to put the puzzle together are listed here alphabetically under general headings, with a short note on what each offers and whether resources are free to view (Free), or require a subscription (£).

Note that, even the subscription sites offer some records free and that it’s always worth entering names and places of interest in a Google search (including books, maps and images).

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General Sources

Ancestry.co.uk

Ancestry.co.uk (£) I have a worldwide subscription, so make a lot of use of this for my family history research. Ancestry offers a very extensive collection of birth/baptism, marriage and death/burial records, censuses, school, military service, occupational, criminal and many many other records, and the creation of family trees. New records are added all the time. Coverage (card collection) is here. Some records are freely available.

Discovery (The National Archives)

Discovery (Free to search) The search engine of The National Archives – allows searching of the very extensive holdings of TNA and the catalogues of archives across the UK, including those relating to individuals, families, places and businesses. These are generally catalogue descriptions, but where digitised records are available, these can be downloaded, sometimes free, sometimes for a fairly small charge. Over 9 million of 32 million records (Jan 2022) are available for download. It’s particularly useful for military, naval, police, land ownership and manorial records, and early wills.

FamilySearch

FamilySearch (Free) Extensive resource from the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints (Mormons), in association with parish and archive record collections; search transcripts from parish records, some censuses and other records. Browse images of digitised parish registers. Find out what and how to search the records. You can also search for historical maps and books.

FindMyPast

FindMyPast (£). Again, I have a subscription to this service. You can search for people, and for addresses in some record sets. Like Ancestry, and I prefer the way it presents and filters search results to Ancestry. It offers extensive parish register collections, including images and transcriptions, census records, is very good for army, naval/merchant navy and criminal records and has considerable Catholic records – useful for the families mentioned in the diary. It also allows searching of The British Newspaper Archive (which is also available as a separate subscription site), which is great for birth, marriage and death announcements and articles on accidents, businesses etc. Some records are also searchable without payment – details here.

FreeBMD

FreeBMD (Free) Transcriptions of the indices of the civil registers of births, marriages and deaths in England and Wales from July 1837, with useful search options by name and place (for coverage information see here). See also associated sources for some census transcripts (FreeCEN) and parish records (FreeREG). When trying to find a vital record, I often use FreeBMD first, and then check results in the GRO (as you can only search a year + or – 2 on that site, but it gives mother’s maiden name for all records and also ages at death).

The Genealogist

The Genealogist (£) Offers similar records to Ancestry and FindMyPast, although the census image scans and census search facility and results are generally of a higher quality, and include occupations and birth places in the summary results, making it easier to filter out irrelevant data. You can search for people and addresses. Again, I have a subscription. There is a focus on non-conformist registers as well as parish registers, helpful for the Catholic families who feature in the diary. The map explorer has recently been upgraded and allows search/browse of records by place and access to tithe and landowner records for some counties, and old maps geolocated to modern equivalents. A great way to find out about places ancestors lived, who owned the properties they rented, who their neighbours were.

Google Books

Google Books (Free). I have found quite a few full-text books featuring places and, occasionally, people, that filled in some of the gaps from basic records, and gave background to the newspaper articles found at the British Newspaper Archive at FindMyPast. In some cases, old genealogies are available and, while not necessarily always accurate, they can be a useful starting point or cross-reference.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia (Free). My main resource for information about events (especially military or civic), places and potentially famous (or infamous) people, and images that can be used – with appropriate attribution and licenses – on personal blogs. It is helpful in understanding industrial development, inventions, housing and social conditions and the regiments and actions of the British Army. Facts should always be cross-checked where possible, and quoted sources followed up.

Military Sources

Many military records are available via Ancestry, FindMyPast and The Genealogist, and general information about regiments and battles can be found at Wikipedia, but there are also some sites that focus specifically on military records relevant to specific conflicts or services.

Anglo-Boer War

This Free site’s aim is “to make available information on the Anglo Boer War 1899 – 1902 and other South African conflicts in the period 1779-1906 and to provide a forum for discussion of the many aspects of these conflicts”. The site is free to use, offering searches by name of soldiers and information on regiments as well as battles fought. It is helpful as background to the lives of families living at the time, as the conflict played out very much in the national consciousness via newspapers, as well as information on those who fought. Many families named children born around this time after major battles or places; there are several May Pretorias in my family trees, for example.

British Battles

BritishBattles.com (Free) offers in-depth information on major battles throughout British History. Useful for fleshing out background to service records of those who saw service in India and Africa in the 1880s-1890s and later in the Anglo Boer Wars.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWCG) (Free) offers name searches for members of the Commonwealth forces who died in the First and Second World Wars, with results including rank, regimental/service numbers, regiment, date and place of death, and where buried (or recorded on a memorial). Biographical information (eg ‘husband of …’, ‘son of …’ and address) may also be shown.

Fold3

Fold3 (£) Sister site to Ancestry, results from Fold3’s military records will be returned in Ancestry searches with basic information transcribed from the record. To see the full documents, you will need a separate subscription to Fold3; it is worth it if you have a lot of military ancestors or just want to find out more about their service records, pensions, medals etc., in documents that aren’t necessarily available elsewhere (note however that many military records are also available at the other subscription sites mentioned above).

The Gazette

The London Gazette (also The Gazette) (Free) – The official journal featuring statutory notices relating to insolvency, wills and probate, Honours (military and civil), army promotions, army lists, casualties, name changes, church, companies and much more, since November 1665. Results are also returned via FindMyPast, Ancestry and other sites.

The Long Long Trail

The Long Long Trail is a really useful (Free) site for finding out how to find out about military service records, field diaries, medal rolls, battles etc., from the First World War. It offers useful information on the Army in general, the stages of a soldier’s career, relevant regulations etc.

The Ogilby Muster

This is a meta-site, bringing together material from various military museums and archives which may not be readily available elsewhere. The Ogilby Muster is free to search and documents with watermarks can be viewed without charge. There is a charge for downloading individual documents. Searches can be made by regiment, conflict or name.

London

The first few generations of my family came from or lived in London, mostly South of the River Thames. There are a number of sites specifically about London which I used to flesh out information from other records, providing images, maps and documents.

Charles Booth’s London

Charles Booth’s London (Free) is hosted by the London School of Economics. The site presents digitised police notebooks, maps, commentary and statistics drawn from Charles Booth’s Inquiry into the Life and Labour of the People in London (1886-1903). Here you can search by street or area and find out what Booth’s surveyors saw as they examined the living and working conditions of Londoners. It is particularly useful for streets and parts of London that have since disappeared (many in the process of being cleared at the time of the Survey). Great for background on late Victorian and early Edwardian London.

The London Picture Archive

The London Picture Archive is another site (Free to search) that is great for filling in background to London ancestors’ homes and workplaces, this time through images. It offers over 250,000 images of London from the collections at London Metropolitan Archives and the Guildhall Art Gallery. Images can be found via a text search or by using a map of London. Some images are also collated into themes, eg Department Stores, Inns, Taverns and Public Houses etc. Images are fully copyright and cannot be downloaded or copied without permission (and payment), but just browsing the watermarked images is useful for getting a feel for the places ancestors lived and worked.

London Lives 1690-1800

London Lives: Crime, Poverty and Social Policy in the Metropolis (Free) offers a fully searchable edition of 240,000 manuscripts from eight archives and fifteen datasets, giving access to 3.35 million names. It is particularly useful for understanding crime and punishment in pre-Victorian Britain. Some of my ancestors fell foul of the law, and others were policemen, so this site’s access to the records of The Old Bailey and prisons was very helpful. Some of the records are also available through subscription sites such as Ancestry and FindMyPast.

Other places

British History Online

British History Online (Free) “a collection of nearly 1300 volumes of primary and secondary content relating to British and Irish history, and histories of empire and the British world. BHO also provides access to 40,000 images and 10,000 tiles of historic maps of the British Isles”. Great for finding out the history of the places people lived and worked, who owned land (and therefore which manorial records to look for) and who provided church livings locally for known clergymen. Particularly useful for Victorian or earlier information.

Historical Directories of England and Wales

The University of Leicester’s Special Collections offer digitised historical regional and trade directories as searchable PDFs (Free). They can be useful to check the location of people and businesses around the country, although coverage varies. The search engine is quite slow and it can be a bit tedious scrolling through search results. Some of these may also be available through subscription sites such as Ancestry, The Genealogist and FindMyPast, or in digitised book collections at Google Books.

Online Historical Maps (NLS)

National Library of Scotland’s free online historical maps (Free) A fabulous and extensive collection of high resolution historical maps from across the UK. Search/browse town plans and views (good for major cities such as London), or at county or other levels. Find the streets where family lived, and explore their neighbourhoods, what was nearby their homes, their nearest schools and churches, businesses, distances travelled etc.

Workhouses.org

Workhouses.org.uk (Free). An extensive site by Peter Higginbottom on the history of the UK’s workhouses, featuring maps, photos and contemporary accounts. Many workhouses also provided the only hospital care in their area, and several of my family spent time in workhouses, some born there, many dying there, others there temporarily because of poverty or illness.

Bedford Borough Council: Community Histories

This free site has a large number of pages relating to Bedfordshire communities, such as the places my maternal ancestors lived, including Sandy, Girtford, etc. There are maps, images, short histories of pubs, schools and other institutions, stories of local families and much more.

Norfolk Record Office Online Catalogue (NROCat)

NORCat‘s (Free) Advanced Search is a great way of finding records held by the Norfolk Record Office. My Wales ancestors came from Norfolk (and I suspect but cannot prove that my Stocking ancestors at some point came from there too). Many parish and other records from Norfolk are available at subscription sites, but this online catalogue allows free searching across the Record Office’s holdings in order to locate the original documents.

Norfolk Family History Society

Join the NFHS (£) to use their membership site, which allows access to NORS, their online research service. Find transcriptions of Norfolk baptisms, marriages (including names of witnesses) and burials, and other records which the Society has made available. The membership fee is low, and if you have ancestors from Norfolk, as I do, then its newsletter and other services are very useful.

Deaths, Burials and Wills

In addition to the general sources mentioned above, some sites focus specifically on locating burials, graves and wills.

DeceasedOnline

DeceasedOnline (£) Database of burial registers, searches are free. Pay-per-view by subscription or buying credits to see burial register scans and details of location of graves (where available), and who else was buried in the same grave. Content is growing all the time. See coverage information here. Searches on Ancestry.co.uk will include results for DeceasedOnline, but you will need to pay separately at DeceasedOnline to view records.

FindAGrave

FindAGrave (Free). Extensive and growing community-built database of information from headstones/grave markers from cemeteries across the UK, including photos and links to cemetery information where available. Search by name or find a cemetery by map view.

FindAWill

FindAWill (£) UK Government site allowing search by name and year of death for wills and probate records 1858-present, including soldiers’ wills. The site was relaunched in early 2022 and had some bugs, with many wills not being returned in the results. Work is undergoing to make improvements (Jan 2023). During the pandemic restrictions, PDF copies of wills or letters of administration could be downloaded for £1.50 and this is still the case (Jan 2023). Note that probate records and some early wills are available via the general subscription sites mentioned above.