This page contains news of anything new in the field of family history research.

What did your ancestors leave behind? (added 23rd August, 2010)

Wills and probate records are much more than just lists of possessions your ancestors left behind when they died. They can provide details of a forebear's wealth and social standing; you can find out about their tastes and interests; and you can even discover the history of their family heirlooms. Plus, details of the beneficiaries can reveal new relatives for you to explore.

The listing of all these records are held on what is called Probate Calendars and Ancestry have recently brought out some of these collections online, the prime one being the National Probate Calendar 1861-1941. As well as telling you when and where your ancestors died, and revealing the value of the estate they left, the Calendar provides a vital link to wills and probate records created in England and Wales.

Casualties of the Boer War, 1899-1902 (added 28th, June, 2010)

The Second Boer War is a major milestone in the history of the British Armed Forces and more troops were sent overseas than in any previous conflict. This had a huge effect on the 1901 census and if any of your ancestors are missing from that record they could have been fighting in South Africa. These casualty lists detail over 50,000 men who were wounded or captured. This new database is available on www.ancestry.co.uk

Religious dissenters records go online (added 31st May, 2010)

The records of religious dissenters, including William Blake and Daniel Defoe, have been published for the first time. The database which went online this week, discloses those who refused to conform to the doctrine of the Anglican Church over the past 225 years including Methodists, Presbytrerians, Congregationalists, Baptists and Quakers.

More than 224,000 names are included in the register, which dates from the late 17th century. The papers are from the London Metropolitan Archives and were compiled by Ancestry.co.uk, where the records can now be viewed.

A line to the past - Army records opened (added 16th March, 2010)

The military records of British soldiers from 1760 to 1913 are to be opened to the public. The records are The National Archives' official notes of the 1.5 million privates, non-commissioned officers and other lowly ranks who left with a pension from The Royal Hospital at Chelsea.

The records of the Chelsea Pensioners include fascinating details - one John Henry Fry, of Barnstaple, Devon, enlisted for twelve years but lasted three days because he was not 'likely to become and efficient soldier'.

The full records cover the period from 1760, when soldiers fought with muzzleloading muskets in the Seven Years' War against Prussia, to 1913.

The first 250,000 records went online yesterday at the site findmypast.co.uk

2010 Edited Electoral Roll - 1st release (added 9th January, 2010)

The 2010 Edited Electoral roll is live on 192.com and you can now search and preview:

22 million names and address that have just been added of which 3.5 million were for people that registered at a new address last year. Added to this, a second release of 2.5 million records will be available next month!

Searching the Edited Electoral Roll is the best way to find someone you've lost touch with. This fantastic database lets you search without specifying a location (unlike directory enquiries) and lets you narrow down your search by searching for other known household occupants. A very good database.

Definitive WW1 Service Records (added 6th December, 2009)

The complete British Army WW1 Service Records are now available online with Ancestry. You can search through 27 million images of detailed personnel files.

Although German bombers destroyed some, 2.8million records survived or were carefully reconstructed from pension records. Finally, after two years of painstaking work, these astonishing records are ready to search. As well as these records, also included in the collection are the De Ruvigny's Roll of Honour, 1914-1924 records where there are 25,000 - including 7,000 accompanied by photos. You will also find the Irish casualties of WW1, 1914-1918 of which there were 49,000 conscripts who served and died in the Great War.

Veterans of the Hundred Years War (added 22nd July, 2009)

A 12-year-old soldier is among 250,000 veterans of the Hundred Years War, whose service details have been made available in an online database. The archive contains information on troops who fought for England against the French between 1369 and 1453, including archers who served with Henry V at Agincourt. The entries, based on royal treasury records, include the rank of the soldier, their commanding officer and the campaigns where they saw conflict.

The youngest soldier recorded is Thomas, Lord Despenser, whose career began when he was 12 years old in 1385. The career of Thomas Gloucestre, who fought at Agincourt, can be traced over 43 years and includes campaigns in Prussia and Jerusalem.

The database, which is free to use, can be found at:

 http://www.medievalsoldier.org

Landowners (added 15th July, 2009)

A complete collection of landowner records from the 19th century is available to search online for the first time at Familyrelatives.com. Published in 1873, the 'Return of Owners' gives the names and addresses of every landowner in Britain, together with details of their holdings and the estimated annual rental value. London was excluded from the survey but the collection contains the names of more than 320,000 people, including aristocrats with thousands of acres and literary figures like Dickens and Tennyson.

Census Maps  (added 4th July, 2009)

Registration district maps from the 1871 census have been made available to download online at Cassinimaps.co.uk. The project uses original images from the Ordnance Survey 'Old Series', which were annotated to indicate the administrative make-up of England and Wales at the time. Put together in partnership with The National Archives, this new digital resource allows the user to create personalised maps based on postcodes or place names. I's not yet complete but searching is free and the mad can be downloaded for a small charge.

Australian Records (added 16th June, 2009)

You can now easily track down forebears who emigrated to Australia now that 863,000 records for the states of Victoria and New South Wales have been scanned and uploaded to Findmypast.com. The records include an account of convict arrivals in New South Wales between 1788 and 1842. Compiled from government records, the index contains the personal details on 97,797 people, including name, date of arrival and the ship on which they were transported.

Also on the same site are cemetery burials and memorial inscriptions for Victoria between 1835 and 1997, which contain over 185,000 records from almost 200 cemeteries in the state.

London Marriage Licences 1521-1869 (added 23rd March, 2009)

On Ancestry, the introduction of London Marriage Licences are now available. One can search through transcripts of approximately 25,000 marriage licences which were granted by the Bishop of London's Office (1521-1828), the Dean and Chapter of Westminster's Office (1599-1828 and 1599-1699), the Faculty Office of the Archbishop of Canterbury (1543-1869) and the Vicar General's Office of the Archbishop of Canterbury (1660-1679)

All the records are searchable by name and keyword and consist of images from the original book, as well as lists of licences which were granted in a particular diocese. However, they also include details of marriage licences from all over the UK and are therefore a valuable source of family history information.

Royal Marine Service Records (added 9th February, 2009)

Over 110,000 Royal Marine service records between 1842 and 1936, from series ADM 159, are now available through The National Archives's Documents Online service at www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documentsonline  You can search the records using any of the following: surname, forename, register number or date of enlistment. This means that you no longer need to know the division which the Marine was in which has proved a barrier for researchers in the past. These service records note the date and place of birth, occupation, religion, date and place of enlistment, physical description, names of ships and shore stations served on, plus details of conduct, promotion and medal entitlement.

Incoming Passenger Lists (added 8th November, 2008)

Ancestry has launched a major collection of immigration records in partnership with The National Archives In recent years numerous data websites have provided access to records relating to emigration from Britain and Ireland, particularly to the United States and Australia. Now the balance has been redressed with the UK Incoming Passenger Lists collection which covers 100 million journeys from the 1878-1960 period.

During that time the UK population doubled from nearly 25 to more than 50 million people, partly as a result of independence in the British colonies. The data in this collection includes returning ex-pats and immigrants, as well as tourists and business travellers, and you can use the information in conjunction with records from other countries to build up a rich picture of people's lives and movements in a century of change. Ancestry can be found at www.ancestry.co.uk

Commemorating the Armistice (added 1st November, 2008) 

November marks the 90th anniversary of the armistice which finished the 'war to end all wars'. Throughout the month, Ancestry's First World War military collections will be made available for free at www.ancestry.co.uk/military including the medal index cards, which show the various medals to which soldiers were entitled, and surviving soldiers' service records.

Find the Nonconformists in your family tree (added 9th May, 2008)

BMDRegisters.co.uk have now added Quaker's (Society of Friends) birth, marriage and death records to their Nonconformist records. One can do a basic search for free but there is a small fee for advanced searches and downloads. Use BMDRegisters.co.uk to take you to the National Archives site.

Criminal history records online (added 28th April, 2008)

Unseen files from some of the most sensational criminal trials in history are now made available online. Transcrips from Old Bailey cases, including Oscar Wilde's famous triwl for gross indecency and the infamous case of Dr Crippen who killed his wife, form part of 110,000 pages of records made available for free. The London court's records include details of more than 210,000 criminal trials from 1674 to 1913.

The website is a joint project by the Universities of Sheffield and Hertfordshire and the Open University. It hosts more than 120 million words and 195,000 digital images and is the largest single source of searchable historical information about everyday British lives. It allows people to search under a person's name, offence committed and punishment given.

The files can be viewed at www.oldbaileyonline.org - the Old Bailey Proceedings website.

Find your relative who sailed away before 1960 (added 3rd April, 2008)

You can now go to Ancestorsonboard.com for the names of people leaving ports in the United Kingdom and Ireland from 1890 to 1960. You will find over 24 million people travelling to Australasia, India, South Africa and North America. The index is free to search.

Slave Register online (added 3rd April, 2008)

Descendants of British Empire slaves can trace their history after the launch of an online register today.

Ancestry.co.uk has details of more than 2.7 million slaves and 280,000 slave owners from 17 former colonial dependencies including Antigua, Barbados, Jamaica and Tobago covering 1812 to 1834. The slave registers are, for many, the only record of their ancestors' existence.

First World War Servicemen's Records online (added 20th February, 2008)

The heroism of millions of Britain's First World War servicemen from ordinary foot-soldiers to actors and future prime ministers is now online. The exploits of famous names such as Harold Macmillan and Anthony Eden, who would both survive the battlefield to lead their country, as well as Noel Coward and Harry Patch, the last remaining 'Tommy', are among the stories published.

The records of 5.5 million troops awarded medals between 1914 and 1922 - the most comprehensive Great War collection in existence - have been released by the website Ancestry.co.uk  It will give people an unprecendented opportunity to trace the wartime achievements of their ancestors as most of the official service records from the First World War were destroyed during a German air raid in 1941.

Fifteen different medals were awarded, from the Victoria Cross to campaign honours such as the Victory Medal, to British and Commonwealth troops. The files are held by the Western Front Association and go online in two phases, the first bof which is today.

The Domesday Book online (added 11th February, 2008)

The Domesday Book is now available free online for the first time after the 900-year-old parchment papers were turned into a database that can be read on the internet. The Domesday Book, the oldest and most famous public record in Britain, was based on the 1086 survey of England which covered 13,418 settlements south of the rivers Ribble and Tees. For the first time, anyone can now reach, retrieve and analyse material while searching the database.

The Book is available online at www.esds.ac.uk/findingdata.

Casualties of the Great War (added 4th February, 2008)

The war records of more than 10,000 naval servicemen who fought alongside the army on the Western Front in the Royal Naval Division are now available on the internet for the first time.

Founded in 1914 by Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, it was created from the huge surplus of men unable to get a place aboard warships. It was regarded as a highly efficient fighting force and played a prominent part in some of the bloodiest battles of the war.

The files document the date and cause of death of 10,200 servicemen who fell between 1914 and 1918, more than 1,000 of them on 28th April, 1917 during the fight for Gavrelle windmill in the battle of Arras - the bloodiest day in the history of the Royal Marines.

The Royal Naval Division's Casualties of the Great War collection include letters, memoirs and diaries and are the most comprehensive available and can be viewed online at www.ancestry.co.uk/military

Civil Service Evidence of Age Index (added 30th November, 2007)

The Civil Service Evidence of Age Index is now available online to be viewed by researchers. This contains the dates of birth or baptism for 64,300 people born between1752 and 1848, many of whose births do not appear in the central birth registers for England and Wales.

The records were created after 1855 when the Civil Service Commission came into being and required applicants to both the Civil Service entry examinations and its pension scheme to provide evidence of age. For those whose births had not been registered in England and Wales, declarations as to birth were submitted, often in the form of handwritten letters. The index is available at www.findmypast.com

New Register of Burials (added 29th November, 2007)

Thanks to a new register of burials in England and Wales, family tree researchers will be able to delve 300 years further back from today. The database, available on www.findmypast.com, dates from 1538, predating the centralised registration of deaths in England and Wales, which began in 1837.

It includes details of more than 13 million burials contained in parish registers, non-vonformist registers, Roman Catholic, Jewish and other registers as well as cemetery and cremation records. All the records can be cross-searched, making it possible to look for ancestors by surname without needing to know where in the country they came from.

The register provided the full name, date of burial, age at death, name of the county, parish and the church or chapel where the burial took place.

Century of phone books online (added 28th November, 2007)

Telephone books dating back to 1880, which include entries for Winston Churchill and Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, are now online.

The contents of 1,780 directories pubished between 1880 and 1984 are available on the ancestry.co.uk website to help users trace relatives and find out who used to live in their homes.

The first phone book, released for London in 1880, contained just 248 entries. In 1916 Buckingham Palace appeared as VICtoria 6913.

Nonconformist births, marriages and deaths (added 5th October, 2007)

You can now search 5,000 registers of a huge variety of nonconformist congregations online. What's more, you could add branches to your family tree. Basic searching is free of charge, BMD Registers charge a fee for any advanced searches and image downloads.

Was your great grandmother in the Wrens? (added 5th October, 2007)

Over 5,000 women joined The Women's Royal Naval Service during World War One, popularly know as the 'Wrend'> These records are now available online for the first time from The National Archives. Search by surname, forenames, date or place of birth and discover if your great grandmother was in the 'Wrens'.

Wounded heroes' tales revealed on the Net (added 8th August, 2007)

Families across Britain can now uncover the wartime heroism of their ancestors from 8th August when the war pension recods of more than a million soldiers wounded in the First World War came online. Descendants of war veterans can now read first-hand accounts about the horrors faced by their loved ones in the trench warfare of the 1914-1918 war.

All First World War service records were destroyed when bombs wrecked the War Office in London during the Blitz in 1940, but the pension records were kept in the National Archives and now, after two years' computer scanning, are available at www.ancestry.co.uk

The ten pages of information on each soldier includes their physical description, where they served, former occupation, promotions, and how they were wounded.

Advanced closure of Family Record Centre (added 25th July, 2007)

The Office of National Statistics announced today that the anticipted closure of the Public Search Room facilities at Myddleton Street which was due to occur by the end of March 2008, will now actually occur some 5 months earlier. The ground floor of the Search Room will close at the beginning of November 2007. No certificate ordering or collecting service will be put in its place and the paper indexes will be withdrawn.

The closure of the Family Records Centre was intended to go hand in hand with improved online indexes to birth, marriages and death records but this is no longer to be the case.

The Society of Genealogists, among others, has said that the closure of the London Search Room at the Family Records Centre is a regrettable withdrawal of services for the genealogical community. It is wholly unsatisfactory that GRO should close its services and make access to the existing indexes more restricted by withdrawing the paper indexes.

A petition has been created on the Downng Street web-site at http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/FRC-closure and everyone interested is requested to sign it. You can get to this petition automatically by clicking on the address.

Digital Black Hole (added 4th July, 2007)

Microsoft joined forces with The National Archives today to stop vital information being lost in a digital black hole.

The tie-up with the software giant means that Britain will be the first nation in the world that can convert old Microsoft documents to be read in modern technology.

Micosoft and The Nartional Archives signed a memorandum of understanding to protect the nation's digital records from the past, present and into the future.

Finding Victorian Jewish Ancestors (added 17th June, 2007)

The Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain has recently launched a new, free database, The Jewish Community in Mid-19th Century Britain, on its website. The database not only pulls together all Anglo-Jewish residents registered in the 1851 census, but also adds information from other sources on births, deaths, 'Faith Affiliation', spouses, children and addresses. This makes it a much more comprehensive source than commercial 1851 census indexes.

Family groups can be identified by following links to find other children with the same parents. In the case of well-known individuals, there will be notes from published biographical sources. A separate page gives citations for the sources used.

The database, at www.jgsgb.org.uk/1851/An_1851_Study1.asp, covers mainly England, Wales and Scotland, with a few additions from Northern Ireland, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man. There are 18,000 names in all - about half the Jewish population of the British Isles in 1851.

1911 census to go online (added 14th May, 2007)

Records of the 35 million people living in England and Wales in 1911 will be viewable from 2009. Dundee-based ScotlandOnline has been chosen to digitise, index and promote the 1911 census on behalf of The National Archives.

Starting in early 2009, the census will be placed online in batches, beginning with London and other large cities such as Manchester and Birmingham. The whole census is expected to be fully online by the end of the year. However, initially not all data will be released. Because the records are being opened slightly early following a recent decision by the Freedom on Information Commissioner, the column of the census form describing infirmities will be blanked out until January 2012.

As with other censuses, users will be able to conduct a free search of the indexes, only paying to download images or transcripts.

Comprising over eight million householder schedules and a further 38,000 enumerators' summary books, the 1911 census currently occupies two kilometres of shelving at The National Archives. Once digitised, the census will take up half a petabyte of computer memory, roughly equivilent to all the storage now available on home PC hard drives worldwide.

Passenger lists from the Titanic (added 10th May, 2007)

Passenger lists from the Titanic can now be seen online. Documents recording the details of all who sailed on the ill-fated maiden voyage were previously kept under tight security at the National Archives, and could be viewed only under supervision.

However, family historians and descendants of the passengers and crew who died when the ship sank on 15th April, 1912 can now read the handwritten lists on the internet at www.ancestorsonboard.com  The lists provide details about each passenger's occupation, nationality, age, the class in which they travelled, departure port and intended destination. They give not only insights into the lives of the victims, but are revealing about those who had a narrow escape. Some Irish passengers who bought tickets did not actually embark, while one family left the ship in Cherbourg, France.

Images of the lists have never before been printed. They are in two sections, of the passengers who boarded at Southampton, and those at Queenstown (now Cobh) in County Cork. The record of passengers who boarded at Cherbourg has not survived.

BBC archive could come free (added 16th April, 2007)

Up to a million hours of broadcasting history could be made available on the internet as part of a plan to open the BBC's archive to licence fee payers.

Lost gems of radio and television, som eof which have never been repeated, include an interview with Martin Luther King filmed shortly before he was assassinated, and a 1956 episode of the nature series Zoo Quest in which a young David Attenborough captures the komodo dragon on film for the first time.

The BBC wants to put the material on the internet for viewers to watch, listen to and download and it has begun the long process of retrieving and transferring programmes. A trial involving 20,000 users will begin in May and the service could become available nationally in a year's time.

Cemeteries are fast filling up (added 25th March, 2007)

Hundreds of graves are now being re-used because of the shortage of burial space. For instance, four London councils are 'reclaiming' graves more than 75 years old. A further eleven say that they may consider the practice because of the scarcity of land in towns.

Laws govering London allow its local authorities to repossess neglected cemetery plots, remove tombstones and bury new coffins above existing remains, provided that they have sought the approval of the family of the deceased.

At the City of London cemetery, the largest enclosed cemetery in the country, officials have reclaimed 1,000 graves over the past three years. Last year 650 graves in West Ham cemetery, Newham, were appropriated for future use.

Cemetery directors say that successive governments have shied away from the issue of re-using graves for fear of alienating voters who object to the dead being disturbed.

Outside London, under the Local Authorities' Cemeteries Order 1977, local authorities may reclaim unused plots but not for additional burials.

ARCHIVES 'among the best' (added 19th March, 2007)

Hampshire's archives have been nationally hailed as amongst the best in the country. The archive in Hampshire Record Office in Winchester has been designated by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council as outstanding and of international importance.

The county record office is one of only two in the country to have been recognised in this way. Exceptionally, Hampshire Record Office also houses an audio-visual archive - Wessex Film and Sound Archive - which has recordings and footage from the earliest days of cinematography and sound recording.

MAGPIE - another addition to online indexes (added 5th March, 2007)

Work is well advanced on digitising the historic birth records (1837-1934) and over 40 million of the 70 million entries have already been processed. These have been loaded on to the EAGLE (Electronic Access to GRO Legacy Events) database.

EAGLE will soon be introducing a more efficient system of recording and tracking customer orders within the General Register Office (GRO) at Southport.

Another bird's name has been chosen as the acronym for a new project - MAGPIE (Multi Access to GRO Published Index of Events). This will provide online indexes to the newly digitised records, and should be available by April 2008.

Also by this date, the historic birth indexes will have been loaded onto EAGLE and the historic death records (1837-1957) should be included. The indexes will be accessible at Kew (as well as online) when the ONS facilities at the Family Records Centre close.

In due course, the modern birth and death records, followed by the historic marriage records (1837-1945), and finally the modern Marriage records will be added.

Dumped Registers (added 3rd March, 2007)

Something of our history, heritage and culture will expire on March 25th with the demise of the hand-written Register. Birth as well as death registrations will be transferred online. We close the red- and black-bound registers, containing what has been described as the finest complete set of such hand-writted records in existence, a tradition that, in England and Wales, has been safeguarded for 170 years.

Five minutes will be saved in the registration process. Relatives of the deceased can anticipate signing a computer-generated sheet at the Register Office, which will contain the last personal details of their loved ones. This print-out becomes the legal record and is entrusted to a register binder of loose-leaf papers. What now is the fate of the Marriage Register?

Registrars embrace online registrations. But is mankind not diminished when promulgations of life and death appear to be reduced to an exercise for the collection and disemination of computer data?

First World War records on line (added 23rd February, 2007)

Personal details of millions of British soldiers who fought in the First World War are to be revealed online. They amount to some 2.5 million names, 28 thousand reels of transcribed microfilm and countless forgotten details about physical appearance, discipline record, regimental movements, postings, next of kin and, in some cases, the manner of their deaths.

The records, known as the WO363 British Army Service records and the WO364 British Army Pension records, can be searched at the website ancestry.co.uk as part of a deal with the National Archives. About 100,000 records were put on line today, including surnames beginning with A or B, with the rest following by the end of 2008.

Many of Britain's original First World War records were destroyed in 1940 by a German bomber. About 60 per cent of the documents relating to 5 million soldiers from England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales were burnt during a German raid on the War Office in September 1940.

Searching the name index on the website will be free and scanned pages from the original files will be available to members of ancestry.co.uk on a pay-per-view basis.

ONS on the move (added 10th February, 2007)

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) plans to close its public search facility at the Family records Centre in Islington. From April next year indexes to births, marriages and deaths will be at The National Archives in Kew.

This will happen before all the records have been digitised and put on the internet. The digitised indexes are expected to be accessible on computers at Kew, but it is not yet clear in what format the undigitised ones will be available.

Child prisoner project added 10th February, 2007)

Prisoner 4099 is a new online project on The National Archive's learning Curve, which looks at the experiences of a child in the Victorian prison system. The pages were produced by the outreach team at Kew and two groups of visually impaired students. It is the first exhibition produced in this way and the first time students have contributed to content development for a Learning Curve exhibition. See it on www.learningcurve.gov.uk

Logging those who left Britain's shores (added 10th February, 2007)

A new online database listing more than 30 million ship passengers who left British ports from 1890 to 1960 will help genealogists find descendants who moved overseas. So far the website only includes records from 1890 to 1899, but files up till the 1920s should be available by the end of the year.

The website, www.ancestorsonboard.com allows you to view digitised high-resolution colour images of passenger lists, customs claims and other documents naming travellers who were going to destinations outside Europe and the Mediterranean. Until now they have only been available at The National Archives.

Latest files uncovered (added 10th February, 2007)

During the 1956 Suez crisis, the French Prime Minister, Guy Mollet, proposed a union between Britain and France. Uncover the story from the National Archives at www.nationalarchives.gov.uk