Welcome to the Family History Social

Over 5 million individuals have been added to TheGenealogist’s Residential and Trade Directories Collection, helping you discover your ancestors, their addresses, and their occupations back to 1744.

The new records cover England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and the Channel Islands, along with some from as far afield as America, Canada, India, New Zealand and South Africa, thus adding an international flavour to this release. 

Dating from 1744 to 1899, the directories in this addition to TheGenealogist are a useful finding aid for ancestors' names, addresses, and occupations and can offer contemporary details of where your past family lived.

If a forebear had a business, then the commercial listings in the directory could help find where an ancestor may have worked.

Early Directories can also be useful for finding the addresses of residents before the census, reveal the railways that may have served the area and to find other communications links to nearby towns. With this information, those who may have ‘lost’ an ancestor may make an educated guess of where a person may have moved to live in the past. 

These directory publications can also be a great complement to a census record, as the topographical information can flesh out an ancestor’s area for the researcher. 

In the case of a head of the household, we may be able to find an address different from that recorded in other records such as the decennial census. This may help fill in the gaps of where a stray ancestor moved to between the census counts.

Complete Access for Under £10 a Month!

To celebrate this latest release, TheGenealogist is offering its four-month Diamond package for just £39.95 – that’s less than £10 a month! 

To find out more and claim the offer, visit: https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/MGBDIR124

This offer expires at the end of 9th February 2024.

Read TheGenealogist’s article: An important resource in tracing ancestors and the man behind the popular Kelly's Directories.

https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2012/an-introduction-to-directories-43/

About TheGenealogist

TheGenealogist is an award-winning online family history website, which puts a wealth of information at the fingertips of family historians. Their approach is to bring hard to use physical records to life online with easy to use interfaces such as their Tithe and newly released Lloyd George Domesday collections. 

TheGenealogist’s innovative SmartSearch technology links records together to help you find your ancestors more easily. TheGenealogist is one of the leading providers of online family history records. Along with the standard Birth, Marriage, Death and Census records, they also have significant collections of Parish and Nonconformist records, PCC Will Records, Irish Records, Military records, Occupations and Newspaper record collections amongst many others.

TheGenealogist uses the latest technology to help you bring your family history to life. Use TheGenealogist to find your ancestors today!

The Ministry of Justice (MOJ) has proposed to digitise the post-1858 wills collection of England and Wales, which is fine. However, they then suggest that they would then destroy the originals, citing heavy storage costs as the reason for doing this. The 32-page consultation document, issued on 15 December, on the storage and retention of original will documents may be read here:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/65703ecb0f12ef07a53e02b9/storage-retention-original-will-documents-print.pdf

This has caused a lot of negative reaction in the family history community and many of us have been signing the petition here:

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/654081

The latest 1939 Register update has now been released by TheGenealogist.

More than 389,600 new individuals have been added after being opened in accordance with the 100-year rule and open requests submitted by the public. This now means we can search for even more of our ancestors from this period and see where they lived using the powerful mapping tools that TheGenealogist has a reputation for providing. 

As these records are linked to pins on TheGenealogist’s Map Explorer™, a tool that allows you to view both historical and modern maps, family historians are able to explore the neighbourhood where their forebears lived as WW2 broke out.

Actor and director Richard Attenborough’s record in the 1939 Register is included in the release. His family home, College House, Leicester, is shown as a linked pin on TheGenealogist’s Map Explorer™

Map Explorer™ will often be able to show the location of properties from 1939 down to the actual building in many cases and at least to the thoroughfare or parish. This makes it a great tool for the family historian to use to find where their forebears lived at this time.

House historians will also be excited to discover that TheGenealogist’s version of the 1939 Register can also be searched from a plot on a map to find who lived there in 1939. This turns the search on its head - as well as being able to look for where a person lived, you can also search for who lived at a property. You can even use Map Explorer to browse the map from house to house to see who lived there, a feature that can only be found on TheGenealogist.

With more precise mapping features, there are some very compelling reasons to search the 1939 Register on TheGenealogist. 

• Unique and powerful search tools and SmartSearch technology offer a uniquely flexible way to look for your ancestors
  
  
• Use Map Explorer to explore an area in 1939 and see how it changed over time
  
  
• Break down your brick walls when searching using keywords, such as the individual’s occupation or date of birth
  
  
• Search for an address and then jump straight to the household, or if you are struggling to find a family, you can even search using as many of their forenames as you know
  
  
• SmartSearch technology enables you to discover even more about a person by linking to their Birth, Marriage and Death Records
  
  

12 Month Diamond Package Only £109.95

To celebrate this latest release, TheGenealogist is offering readers of this blog a 12 Month Diamond package for just £109.95, a Saving of Over £64!

This offer comes with a Lifetime Discount, meaning you’ll pay the same discounted price every time your subscription renews.

To find out more and claim the offer, visit: https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/MGBREG124

This offer expires at the end of 12th April 2024.

See TheGenealogist’s article: Updated 1939 Register reveals schoolboy Richard ‘Dickie’ Attenborough on a University Campus in Leicester. https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2024/1939-register-reveals-schoolboy-dickie-attenborough-on-a-university-campus-in-leicester-6924/ 

About TheGenealogist

TheGenealogist is an award-winning online family history website, who put a wealth of information at the fingertips of family historians. Their approach is to bring hard to use physical records to life online with easy to use interfaces such as their Tithe and newly released Lloyd George Domesday collections. 

TheGenealogist’s innovative SmartSearch technology links records together to help you find your ancestors more easily. TheGenealogist is one of the leading providers of online family history records. Along with the standard Birth, Marriage, Death and Census records, they also have significant collections of Parish and Nonconformist records, PCC Will Records, Irish Records, Military records, Occupations, Newspaper record collections amongst many others.

TheGenealogist uses the latest technology to help you bring your family history to life. Use TheGenealogist to find your ancestors today!

EVENTS NEWS:

Behind the Scenes Tours of The National Archives

• Thursday 25 January 2024, 15:30
• Thursday 15 February 2024, 15:30
• Thursday 21 March 2024, 15:30

The National Archives are opening the doors of their repositories to offer you the chance to go behind the scenes.

Discover how they keep and maintain the record for future generations and explore some of the hidden gems in their collections.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/behind-the-scenes-tours-january-to-march-tickets-763441543207