The National Archives Podcasts

The National Archives UK has just launched a new series of free podcasts focusing on 20th Century Migration.  

According to the Archives :
"There are over 900 years of immigration records available for research here at The National Archives. In our latest three-part podcast series, we’re exploring the rich history of migration in the 20th century.

This series focuses on three major Acts that highlight shifts in policy around migration and citizenship over the past 100 years. We feature the profound and lasting impact of migration for citizens and non-citizens alike throughout Britain, its Empire and the Commonwealth."

An introductory podcast in this series was launched Monday 22 November.  

There are a number of other topics covered on the National Archives Podcast page, including Countdown to the 1921 Census ; Digitally Reconstructing Ireland's Lost Archive ; a three part series on Crime ; and more.  Take a look and see what you can learn.

Digital Churchyard Mapping Project for the Church of England

The Church of England has launched a new project to map all its churchyards using laser equipment.  They have partnered with surveying company Atlantic Geomatics, who will map Church of England churchyards using backpack-mounted laser scanners, as well as photographing the headstones.  The resulting records will be published on a new website, where they will enable family historians to discover where their ancestors are buried.

Bishop Andrew Rumsey, lead Bishop for church buildings said: “This impressive national project will make a huge difference to those researching family history, as well as easing the administrative burden on parishes.  It will improve management of burial grounds, and make information more fully accessible than ever before, supported by additional services by subscription for those wishing to go further.  It will soon be possible to visit almost any Anglican burial ground in the country and see in real time the location of burial plots. For those researching at distance in the UK or overseas, the digital records will place detailed information from churchyards at their fingertips.”

The project aims to survey the majority of the Church of England’s 19,000 burial grounds by 2028.

The website, which is due to launch in spring 2022, will combine data on burials and biodiversity data on the plants and animals in the churchyards.  It is anticipated the site will provide free to access for Church of England parishes, with additional services available to subscribers. 

After a successful pilot project which mapped the churchyards of All Hallows Church in Kirkburton and Emmanuel Church in Shelley, both in the Diocese of Leeds, the programme has now successfully mapped the churchyard of St Bega in Bassenthwaite in the Diocese of Carlisle.

The live links to the records on these two pilot studies can be found here:

• Kirkburton
• Shelley

New English and Welsh Death Records Online

The General Register Office (GRO) has updated its online index to cover all deaths registered in England and Wales from 1984 to 2019.
The minimum information required for searching the index is the deceased’s surname, gender and year of death within two years. The free indexed entries give their full name, year of birth, registration district and GRO reference number. You can then order a full certificate online at a standard cost of £11.

Previously the GRO’s death index only covered the years 1837 to 1957. The new addition will still leave a gap of 27 years in the index, although deaths up to 2007 can be searched on other family history websites.

English and Welsh Maps Free Online

The National Library of Scotland has announced a major new online resource for family historians - a collection of English and Welsh maps covering more than 100 years.

The highly detailed zoomable maps of England and Wales from 1842 to 1952 allow anyone to browse through a catalogue of place names, modern street names, postcodes and grid references. You can access the maps at maps.nls.uk/os/6inch-england-and-wales/info1.html.

The website compiles 37,390 sheets, including 35,124 quarter sheets of A2 size, and 2,236 full sheets at A0 size, which makes for a wide range of search options.

The National Library of Scotland’s map digitisation work in recent years has been externally funded, leading to a recent expansion in map images beyond Scotland including a Victorian plan of London which was uploaded last year.

The Ordnance Survey six-inch mapping system is the most detailed map scale to cover England and Wales and can record most man-made features in the landscape such as roads, railways, fields, fencing, streams and buildings. Smaller features such as letterboxes, bollards and mileposts can also be seen.

For many of the towns featured, the maps show the detailed urbanisation and rapidly changing landscape from 1914 through to the 1940s thanks to 25 inch to the mile mapping.

Although images can only be viewed individually, you have the option via the map group tool to look at an area from the 1840’s up until 1952. 

Operation War Diary

In the first eight weeks since the launch of TNA's Operation War Diary project - which is being jointly run with Imperial War Museums and web portal Zooniverse, more than 10,000 people across the world have volunteered to tag names, places and other key details in the diary. For more information on the project or to register to volunteer, visit the website at www.operationwardiary.org. 

Now The National Archives has released the second batch of its WW1 unit war diaries, comprising almost 4,000 diaries which relate to the last of the Cavalry and the 8-33 Infantry Divisions deployed to the Western Front in the First World War. It also covers the period of the units’ involvement in France and Belgium, from their arrival on the front, to their departure at the end of the Great War.

“This second batch of unit war diaries provides detailed accounts of the actions of the next troops to arrive on the Western Front,” explained William Spencer, author and military specialist at TNA.  “They show advancements in technology that made it the world’s first industrialised war with many mounted troops going into battle, at first with swords on horseback before ending the war with machine guns and tanks.”

Data gathered through Operation War Diary will be used for three main purposes:

• to enrich The National Archives' catalogue descriptions for the unit war diaries,

• to provide evidence about the experience of named individuals in IWM's Lives of the First World War project

•  to present academics with large amounts of accurate data to help them gain a better understanding of how the war was fought

Operation War Diary depends on the work done by The National Archives to digitise the unit war diaries, and they've made individual pages available free of charge on the Zooniverse platform for this project. Whole war diaries are available from Discovery, The National Archives' catalogue, where they can be searched free of charge and downloaded for a small fee.

All of the data produced by Operation War Diary will eventually be available to everyone free of charge- a lasting legacy and a rich and valuable introduction to the world of the War Diaries.

Historic England

Historic England has been hard at work adding new collections to their online resources.  Below are a few of their recent additions.

Topical Press Agency Medical Collection.

A remarkable collection of more than 4,000 medical images, discovered deep within the vaults of the Historic England Archive.  The images document health care from 1938 to 1943, and detail wartime hospital staff, patients, procedures and practices.  The photographs in the collection are very well annotated, providing great insight into medical treatments during the Second World War. They feature hospitals and practices all around the country, from Liverpool to London. 

Maurice Barley Collection

Professor Maurice Willmore Barley (1909-1991) was born and brought up in Lincoln. After training as a teacher, he spent much of his professional life in academia. He worked at Hull University before moving to Nottingham in 1946, ultimately becoming the University’s first Professor of Archaeology in 1971.
Whilst at Nottingham he became an authority on English domestic and farmhouse architecture. He wrote a number of books on this subject of vernacular architecture, notably ‘The English Farmhouse and Cottage’ (1961).
The collection of over 5,000 prints and negatives, dates from the 1940s onwards. It reflects Barley’s interest in vernacular buildings, together with his passion for local history. The contents are heavily focussed on the vernacular houses and farmsteads of the East Midlands, some capturing buildings shortly before demolition. Thus far 1300 negatives, approximately a quarter of the collection, has been digitized.

The J J Samuels Collection

The archive has recently finished cataloguing a collection of photographs from Julian Joseph Samuels Ltd showing a variety of London streets and landmarks during the first half of the 20th century. The collection is focussed largely on Westminster and the City of London.  Tourist hotspots like Trafalgar Square and London Zoo feature alongside important legal and religious buildings like Lincolns Inn and St Paul's Cathedral.
The photographs were taken by, or possibly for, Julian Joseph Samuels, a postcard dealer based in Westminster. Born in London in 1883, Julian Joseph was one of the six children of Emmanuel Isaac Samuels and his wife Maria. According to census records he was educated at Chatham House School in Ramsgate, Kent before becoming a postcard dealer in the first decade of the 20th century.
During his career Samuels occupied premises along the Strand in Westminster as well as on Piccadilly and Regent Street.

General Register Office PDF Pilot

Have you been ordering birth and death certificates online from England and Wales via the General Register Office (GRO)?  It has just been confirmed that the latest pilot scheme to deliver PDF copies of birth and death records has been a success and will be extended.

Over 79,600 PDF applications had been processed in the three months from the introduction of the pilot on 12 October 2017.  The GRO previously conducted a three-phase PDF pilot between November 2016 and April 2017, but has yet to establish a permanent PDF scheme.  As a result of this popularity and positive feedback, the pilot scheme has now been extended past the minimum three month period.  The scheme applies to births from 1837 to 1916 and deaths from 1837 to 1957, but (sadly) excludes marriage records.

By allowing family historians to order digital copies of records at £6 each with a 5-working day delivery period, it provides a cheaper and quicker alternative to ordering print copies, which cost £9.25 each or £23.40 for priority deliveries.

Personally, I have been taking advantage of this new service quite a bit over the past several months and have had a very positive experience.  All certificates have arrive quickly, and all but one have been correct.  For the one that wasn't right, I simply emailed the GRO pointing out the error (they had supplied the wrong certificate) and the correct certificate arrived within a few days, at no extra cost.  I'll be ordering a few more certificates shortly, and am hoping they will extend the pilot to include marriage certificates soon.

Women's Voluntary Service diaries

31,401 pages of diaries by members of the Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS) are available to view for the first time.  The diaries date from 1938-1942 and cover more than 1,300 different cities, towns and villages across Great Britain.
They were inscribed on the UNESCO UK Memory of the World register in 2010 as one of the most important historical documents in the UK, but have only just been digitised after RVS raised £28,000 for the project from over 700 members of the public via the website Kickstarter.
Stella Isaacs, Marchioness of Reading, founded the WVS in May 1938 and toured the country throughout 1938 and 1939, telling audiences “the greatest disservice a woman can do at the moment is consider herself useless”.  By the end of August 1939, over 300,000 women had joined the organisation and more than 1,200 WVS centres had been set up around the country.
During the war, one in ten British women was a member of the WVS. The jobs these women did were rarely glamorous, but success of the WVS was in using the skills women already had, the skills of wives and mothers; knitting, sewing, cooking, and of course compassion and diplomacy. Where new skills were needed, such as driving in the blackout, extinguishing incendiary bombs or making jumpers from dog’s hair, training was given and many stepped up to the task.
Every account is written in a different style by a different woman. Some are long, others short but all give a fascinating window on a world which is soon to be out of living memory.

General Register Office for England and Wales Online Trial

The General Register Office for England and Wales (GRO) is trialling a new online system that enables researchers to access digital copies of civil registration records for the first time.
The trial, which began on Wednesday 9th November, currently allows users to order PDF versions of the following records:

• Births: 1837-1934 and 2007 onwards
• Deaths: 1837-1957 and 2007 onwards
• Marriages: 2011 onwards
• Civil partnerships: 2005 onwards 

The records – costing £6 each – will not be immediately viewable, but sent directly to the customer’s email address.  If you are using the GRO site for the first time you will need to complete their registration process.  Remember searching their online indexes is free.
This process is estimated to take around five working days and the trial will end on Wednesday 30 November, or when 45,000 PDFs have been ordered - so get in quickly and order those records you want and have put off because of the expense.