International Committee of the Red Cross

The International Committee of the Red Cross is digitizing the records of the International Agency for Prisoners of War (1914-1919).  The results will be available online in 2014.  These documents, which are protected by Unesco Memory of the World program, are meant to be a memorial to the war prisoners of the First World War.

Throughout the war, the Agency collected, analysed and organized information, which it received from detaining powers and National agencies, on individual enemy prisoners.  On the archival level, the Agency has generated with these documents a research system – a manual database - consisting mainly in series of lists, around 500'000 pages, and a card index counting 6 million cards.

Oral History Society

For more than 30 years the Oral History Society has played a leading role in the development of oral history, both in Britain and internationally.  It is dedicated to the collection and preservation of oral history, and making it accessible to everyone.  The Society offers advice, training and access to resources for individuals and a number of regional networks.  Thei website has a calendar of upcoming events, links to training courses, volunteer activities, links to their regional networks and an online journal.

New Resources at FamilySearch

The people at FamilySearch have been busy again this month, adding several new collections.

The Sussex Parish Registers span the years from 1538 to 1910 and can be searched by name. These are primarily baptism, marriage and burial records and comprise some 410,000 individual records.

From Belgium there are the civil registration records, some 10.2 million images. These are civil registrations of births, marriages and deaths. The records are browsable by region (plaats). The largest collections come from Brabant (1582 to 1912), Hainaut (1600 to 1911) and Antwerp (1609 to 1909).

They have also seriously expanded their Spanish collection with an addition of some 7 million searchable municipal records. These records span the years from 1251 to 1966 and consist of everything from local censuses, military records and civil registration (birth, marriage, death) records. The main provinces of Spain included in this new update are Alicante, Almeria, Barcelona, Cádiz, Huelva, Jaén, Coruna, Leon, Lugo, Murcia, Segovia, Sevilla and Valencia. These records can be searched by name.

Finally, there is a new indexed record collection of people who lived in the five boroughs of New York City between 1970 and 2010. This is a massive new collection of some 29.5 million records and has everything from telephone directory listings, driver licenses, property tax assessments, credit applications, voter registration lists, etc. This collection of public records can be searched by name.

Old Maps Online

The Old Maps Online portal allows you to search for and access old maps for free.  Type a place name into the search engine and thumbnail pictures appear.  You can then click on the one you want to view.  There is a list of collections from where the maps have been collated with links to the repositry holding the originals.

Valuation Office Survey

Part of the National Archives website, the Valuation Office Survey was carried out between 1910 and 1915 to assess all site values in the UK for taxation purposes.  The catalogue contains descriptions of nearly 50,000 Valuation Office Survey maps.  When searching you need to have an idea of where your ancestor was living, such as an address from the 1911 census.
The maps serve as the means of reference to more than 95,000 Valuation Office Field Books which contain descriptions of more than 9 million individual houses, farms and other properties, detailing the use and value of lands and buildings, and naming their owners and occupiers. Valuation Office Field Books can only be viewed at The National Archives.

Deceased Online

Deceased Online alows you to search registers by Country, Region, County, Burial Authority or Crematorium free - further information incurs a fee.  They now offer access to the digitised records of the Peterborough Cathedral - 1200 records from the 16th century to 1995.  Burial registers are included for most records and there are some photos of monuments.  Records include Mary, Queen of Scots and Catherine of Aragon.  The site has also started releasing data from its collection of records from London's Brompton Cemetery.

Welsh Newspapers Online

Welsh Newspapers Online is a free online resource from the National Library of Wales where you can discover millions of articles from the Library’s rich collection of historical newspapers. The site currently lets you search and access over 250,000 pages from 24 newspaper publications from 1844 until 1910 and will grow to over 1 million pages as more publications are added during 2013.  Search all newspapers or select specific titles, narrow by date or type of article, or browse through specific newspapers, dates or regions.  Searching is free and does not require users to register at all.