Showing posts with label Wales. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wales. Show all posts

Monday, December 9, 2019

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.

Saturday, May 25, 2019

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. 

Tuesday, January 16, 2018

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.

Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Welsh tithe maps go online

Do you have Welsh ancestry?  The National Library of Wales has completed a project to make tithe maps of Wales searchable online.
The new Places of Wales website is in beta and welcomes feedback from visitors.  It makes over 300,000 records searchable online, along with accompanying apportionment documents.
Tithes were payments charged on land users. Originally, payments were made using commodities like crops, wool, milk and stock. Tithe maps were produced between 1838 and 1850 to ensure that all tithes were paid with money rather than produce.
These are the most detailed maps of their period and they cover more than 95% of Wales. The apportionments accompanying each map list the payable tithes, the names of the landowners and land occupiers, the land use, and in most cases (75%) the field names.
An almost complete set of the tithe maps for Wales is held in the National Library of Wales as part of the diocesan records of the Church in Wales, who kindly consented to them being digitised as part of the Cynefin project.  A complete set of accompanying tithe apportionments was supplied in digital form by The National Archives in London, who had digitised these documents before the start of the project.

Wednesday, July 2, 2014

National Library of Wales

The National Library of Wales has digitized an additional 100,000 historic newspaper pages in the month of June for their website Welsh Newspapers Online. The website now consists of some 725,000 pages and 7.6 million articles from over 100 newspapers.  Newspaper dates range from 1804 to 1919. The website can be searched by keyword and category (such as family notices, advertisements, news or detailed lists). Alternatively, the historic newspapers can be browsed by title and date. Access is free. [Welsh Newspapers Online]

Friday, October 18, 2013

National Library of Wales

The National Library of Wales has a significant selection of databases you can search from The National Library website.
  •    Manors - Manorial Documents Register. A guide to the manors and manorial records of Wales searchable through the National Archives website.