The Down Survey

The Down Survey, so called because a chain was laid down and a scale made, was taken from 1656-8 under the direction of William Petty. Using the Civil Survey as a guide, teams of surveyors, mainly former soldiers, were sent out under Petty’s direction to measure every townland to be forfeited to soldiers and adventurers. The resulting maps, made at a scale of 40 perches to one inch (the modern equivalent of 1:50,000), were the first systematic mapping of a large area on such a scale attempted anywhere. The primary purpose of these maps was to record the boundaries of each townland and to calculate their areas with great precision. The maps are also rich in other detail showing churches, roads, rivers, castles, houses and fortifications. Most towns are represented pictorially and the cartouches, the decorative titles, of each map in many cases reflect a specific characteristic of each barony.


These maps and a lot more information have now been placed online on a web site created by Trinity College Dublin. If you can trace your ancestors back to the 1600s, you may be able to find a lot more about them by using the maps of the Down Survey of Ireland web site. Not only will you find names, but eve maps of their villages, showing roads, churches, and even buildings.


The maps chart the changes in land ownership in Ireland. Users can search by the names of landowners in 1641 and in 1670. It also displays ownership by religion. The web site also displays a lot of other historical information, such as roads and even a Map of the Ulster 1641 Depositions showing the number of recorded murders in each townland.

Yad Vashem

Yad Vashem, the Jewish Holocaust victims website continues to add more genealogy records. This free access website now records some 4 million names and biographical details. This is approximately 2/3 of the roughly six million Jews killed by the Nazis. The database can be searched by name and place of residence. Yad va Shem also accepts submissions of testimony and photographs.
Their mission :
As the Jewish people’s living memorial to the Holocaust, Yad Vashem safeguards the memory of the past and imparts its meaning for future generations. Established in 1953, as the world center for documentation, research, education and commemoration of the Holocaust, Yad Vashem is today a dynamic and vital place of intergenerational and international encounter.

For over half a century, Yad Vashem has been committed to four pillars of remembrance:

• Commemoration
• Documentation
• Research
• Education

Connected Histories

Connected Histories brings together a range of digital resources related to early modern and nineteenth century Britain with a single federated search that allows sophisticated searching of names, places and dates, as well as the ability to save, connect and share resources within a personal workspace.  Most resources can be accessed free, some require subscriber login, such as Origins.net.  Resources include British History Online, British Museum Images, Clergy of the VChurch of England database, the Charles Booth Archive, Convict Transportation Registers database, History of Parliament, House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Lane's Masonic Records, Proceedings of the Old Bailey, and the Witches of Early Modern England.

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.