Ancestry and FamilySearch

Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org have announced a joint agreement whereby they will work together to transcribe and put online an estimated 1 billion new genealogy records over the next five years. Ancestry is the world’s largest genealogy business and FamilySearch has the largest collection of free genealogy records in the world. This agreement is in addition to the joint project between the two to publish 140 million US wills and probate images and indexes over the next three years. Access to Ancestry.com is by subscription and can be searched free in Campaspe Regional Libraries at our public computers of using our free wifi. Access to FamilySearch.org is free.

Anguline Research Archives

Dedicated to making old and rare books available to family and local historians, the Anguline Research Archives catalogue now includes more than 600 titles, including the new Historic Still Birth Register and a free downloads section.  The collection spans all English Counties, Wales, Scotland and now Canada, and titles are browsable by area and category, which include directories, maps, military, parish registers, church and non-conformist history, schools and more.  Titles are in PDF format so they can be viewed on computer, tablet, e-reader and other viewers, and the majority of titles can be bought either on CD or a digital downloads.  

Will Calendars at PRONI

The Will Calendars at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland provides a fully searchable index to the will calendar entries for the three District Probate Registries of Armagh, Belfast and Londonderry, with the facility to view the entire will calendar entry for each successful search.  The database covers the period 1858-1919 and 1922-1943.  Part of 1921 has been added, with remaining entries for 1920-1921 to follow in the near future.  

Digitised images of entries from the copy will books covering the period 1858-1900 are now available online, allowing users to view the full content of a will.  93,388 will images are now available to view.

Scottish Soldier's Wills

Scottish Soldiers Wills are scheduled to come online in 2014 as part of the commemoration of World War 1.  The wills consist of special forms removed from soldiers' pay books, other army forms, or other documents. They are generally very brief and do not mention individual possessions. They contain limited personal or service history information.
About 31,000 wills survive, of which approximately 26,000 date from the First World War (WW I) and 4,700 from the Second World War (WW II). The rest belong to the period between 1857 and 1966. The wills were written by men up to the rank of warrant officer. About 100 wills exist of officers who were commissioned from the rank during WW I, and a few from WWII. There are wills of some Royal Flying Corps (RFC) and Royal Air Force (RAF) personnel from WW I, and of six women serving with the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) during World War II.
The soldiers' wills belong to a special series among the records of the Edinburgh Commissary Office, which received them from the War Office because the men were domiciled in Scotland. Most were not recorded in the commissary registers of the Commissary Office and the sheriff courts.

Archaic Medical Terms

Rudy's List of Archaic Medical Terms is a collection of archaic medical terms and their old and modern definitions.  The primary focus of this web site is to help decipher the Causes of Death found on Mortality Lists, Certificates of Death and Church Death Records from the 19th century and earlier. The web site is updated often and as new information is received, with the intention of collecting and recording old medical terms in all European languages. The English and German lists are the most extensive to date. If you are having trouble decoding the medical language used to describe causes of death then the Archaic Medical Terms website may help you.

WW1 Conscription Appeals

The World War 1 Military Conscription Appeals series contains 11,000 case papers from the Middlesex Appeal Tribunal which, between 1916 and 1918, heard appeals from men who had previously applied to a local tribunal for exemption from compulsory military service. The reasons provided by applicants are varied, with applications made on moral grounds (conscientious objectors), on medical grounds (disability), on family grounds (looking after dependents) and on economic grounds (preserving a business). The vast majority of cases relate to the impact of war on a man’s family or their business interests, and the papers reveal some fascinating and tragic stories.

Due to the sensitive issues that surrounded compulsory military service during and after the First World War, only a small minority of the tribunal papers survive. In the years that followed the end of the war, the Government issued instructions to the Local Government Boards that all tribunal material should be destroyed, except for the Middlesex Appeal records and a similar set for Lothian and Peebles in Scotland, which were to be retained as a benchmark for possible future use. A sample of records from the Central Tribunal were also retained, which are also part of the series.

Great War Pension Records

The Western Front Association (WFA) has announced that it has secured the safe storage and preservation of over six million Great War soldiers' pension record cards after learning that the Ministry of Defence was no longer able to retain and manage this archive.  There was a possibility that the records would have had to be destroyed unless they could be passed for safe keeping to a reputable organisation. 

The WFA has made a study and catalogued the primary information for of each group of records in the archive, and arranged the safe transfer and storage of the records to the WFA's secure premises.

During the Great War, dependents of each serving British soldier, sailor, airman and nurse who was killed were entitled to a pension, as were those service personnel who were wounded or otherwise incapacitated due to the conflict. There is a card for each. These cards are categorised as follows:

• Other Ranks Died (this contains nearly one million individual records)
• Widows and Dependents of Other Ranks Died (in excess of one million records)
• Other Ranks Survived: Requested/Rejected/Receiving Pension (over 2.5 million records)
• Officers survived and Officers' Widows (approximately 150,000 records)
• Merchant Naval Cards (about 5,000 records

The WFA is still working towards this online database, but prior to the records being digitised it will offer manual lookups upon application for a fee.