Welcome to the Family History Social

TheGenealogist has released the Colour Tithe Maps for Essex with full integration with its MapExplorer™. This release allows us to see the area in West Ham, Essex on which the ExCel centre now stands and to discover the changes from Victorian pasture land, to dock complex then Exhibition venue and now to the Nightingale Hospital as the Covid-19 emergency builds.

This versatile tool can give the family history researcher a fantastic insight into what our ancestors’ city, town or village looked like over a number of periods and can also help them to find an ancestor’s property. With the addition of georeferenced Colour Tithe Maps. TheGenealogist has also today released colour tithe maps for Essex – you can search these as normal or browse them on Map Explorer™. 

Joining the georeferenced Lloyd George Data Layer, Headstones and War Memorials, the Colour Tithe Maps are an important enhancement of the ever-expanding Map Explorer™.

• The Map Explorer™ displays maps for historical periods up to the modern day.
• Colour Tithe maps bring the early Victorian era to this innovative tool
• Plots on the maps are linked to the apportionment books, enabling researchers to locate where their ancestors lived or worked

TheGenealogist has linked these highly detailed Tithe maps to the apportionment book records so providing researchers with the details of the plots, their owners and their occupiers at the time of the early Victorian survey. The coverage ranges from large estate owners to ordinary people occupying small plots such as a homestead or a cottage. Colour Tithe Maps make it easier for the researcher to understand the terrain as the streams, rivers, lakes, ponds, houses and trees are often highlighted in different colours. 

TheGenealogist’s Colour Tithe Maps now cover the counties of Buckinghamshire, Cumberland, Huntingdonshire, Middlesex, Northumberland, Rutland, Surrey, Westmorland, the City, North and East Ridings of Yorkshire along with the new addition this week of Essex. 

Subscribers to TheGenealogist’s Diamond membership can now view the latest colour or grayscale maps when using the Tithe & Landowner records.

TheGenealogist’s powerful Map Explorer™ has been developed to view these georeferenced historic maps overlaid on top of modern background maps including those from Ordnance Survey and Bing Street maps, as well as a satellite view. With the Map Explorer™, you can search for an ancestor's property, discovering its site, even if the road has changed or is no longer there. 

Alternatively, using the Master Search on TheGenealogist, having found your forebear listed in the Tithe Records you can click through to the Map Explorer™ which will also show War Memorials or cemeteries on the various maps.

Read TheGenealogist’s article here: 

https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2020/essex-tithe-maps-reveal-ever-changing-landscape-1239/

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!

TheGenealogist has released a collection of searchable Early Trade and Residential Directories that cover the years 1816-1839 to help find ancestors in the period before the usable census records begin.

Prior to 1841 all of the U.K. censuses were generally statistical: that is, mainly headcounts, with virtually no personal information such as names recorded and so family history researchers need to turn to a substitute to find out the address where their ancestors had lived. Trade and Residential Directories list names of tradespeople, prominent citizens and in some cases other residents of a town as well.

The City from Bankside by Thomas Miles Richardson, c.1820

Many of these directories will also give a good description of the town or area which can give family historians an interesting insight into the social history of their ancestors’ locality at the time. This information usually includes the main industry, topographical details, communication links with the surrounding towns by stage coach or railway, and details of local administration offices, post offices, the clergy, charities hospitals and schools.

These directory records have been digitised by TheGenealogist and made searchable by name, so they can help researchers to find their ancestors in the Georgian and very early Victorian period.

The early Trade and Residential Directories being released in this batch include volumes that cover the areas of Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Cornwall, Derby, Devonshire, Dorsetshire, Durham, Essex, Glasgow, Hampshire, London, Liverpool, Middlesex, Northumberland, Norfolk, Nottinghamshire and Suffolk.

List of Directories in this release:

Derby 1829 History, Gazetteer and Directory; Devonshire 1830 Pigot's Directory; Durham 1828 White's Directory; Essex 1832-1833 Pigot's Directory; Glasgow 1831-1832 Post Office Directory; Lincolnshire 1826/7 Directory; Liverpool 1816 Gore's Directory; London 1816 Post Office Directory; London 1819 Robson's Directory; London 1822 Post Office Directory; London and Provincial 1823-1824 New Commercial Pigot Directory; London 1824 Post Office Directory; London 1826 Post Office Directory; London 1828 Robson's Commercial Directory; London 1829 Robson's Trades Directory; London 1831 Post Office Directory; London 1833 Robson's Directory; London 1836 Post Office Directory; London 1837 Post Office Directory; London 1839 Post Office Directory; Norfolk 1830 Pigot's Directory; Northumberland 1828 White's Directory; Nottinghamshire 1832 White’s Directory; Suffolk 1830 Pigot's Directory.

Find out more about directories and how they can help you research your ancestors on TheGenealogist here:

https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/directories/

Talk and document display

Using examples of records and case studies relating to both immigrants and emigrants held in The National Archives collection, this talk will explain how to search for and interpret records such as passenger lists, passports, registration and naturalisation records.

This talk will be delivered by Roger Kershaw, Migration Records Specialist at The National Archives.

Friday 24 April 2020 14:00 – 15:30

To book: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/using-migration-records-tickets-93922152687

Timings are indicative. Talk expected to last one hour, including 15 mins for audience Q&A.

TNA runs a range of events and exhibitions on a wide variety of topics. For more details, visit nationalarchives.gov.uk/whatson.

TheGenealogist has just released over 57,700 individuals from the Greenwich area into its Lloyd George Domesday Survey Records on the Map Explorer™. These fully searchable property records enable researchers to find where ancestors from Greenwich lived in the 1910-1915 period. This release now brings the total coverage of Lloyd George Domesday Survey Records to over half a million individuals.

Lloyd George Domesday Survey of Greenwich from TheGenealogist

By using TheGenealogist’s powerful Map Explorer™ family history researchers searching for where their ancestors lived in the period before the First World War are able to see the actual plots for buildings and explore the district as it was in that period on large scale OS maps linked to the field books containing descriptions of the properties.

Researchers often have difficulty discovering where ancestors lived as road names can change over time. World War II Blitz bombing saw areas destroyed and these sites were altered during redevelopment, making them unrecognizable from what had been there before. Lanes and roads were often lost to build estates and office blocks. The changes over the years can mean that searching for where an ancestor lived using modern maps can be a frustrating experience, as they won’t pinpoint where old properties had once stood.

The Map Explorer™ benefits from a number of georeferenced historic map overlays and modern base maps, allowing users to see how the topography has changed over the years by simply sliding the opacity controls. 

The Lloyd George Domesday Survey records are sourced from The National Archives and are being digitised by TheGenealogist.

• TheGenealogist’s Lloyd George Domesday records link individual properties to extremely detailed maps used in 1910-1915 
• Full descriptions of each property with its valuation recorded in field books
• Locate an address previously found in a census or street directory down to a specific house
• Fully searchable by name, county, parish and street
• The maps will zoom in to show the individual properties as they were in 1910-1915
• Transparency sliders enable you to compare and contrast modern and historic street maps,change the base map displayed to satellite or hybrid to more clearly understand what the area looks like to day 
• Overlay with a range of old maps to see the wider area as it had once been
• Allows you to display county or parish boundaries
• Searching for an ancestor identifies their property with a green pin
• Check neighbouring properties by clicking the red pins and selecting ‘View Transcript’ 
  

Read the article: Greenwich property records reveal the lost past much changed by the blitz, bombs and the building of a historic landmark

https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2020/greenwich-property-records-reveal-the-lost-past-1233/

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!

 About The National Archives

The National Archives is one of the world’s most valuable resources for research and an independent research organisation in its own right. As the official archive and publisher for the UK government, and England and Wales they are the guardians of some of the UK's most iconic national documents, dating back over 1,000 years. Their role is to collect and secure the future of the government record, both digital and physical, to preserve it for generations to come, and to make it as accessible and available as possible. The National Archives brings together the skills and specialisms needed to conserve some of the oldest historic documents as well as leading digital archive practices to manage and preserve government information past, present and future.

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/  http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ 

For the latest stories, follow the Media Team on Twitter @TNAmediaofficer

Geneanet has just launched Geneanet DNA, a new beta test service which allows people to upload the raw data of a DNA test kit taken with any company, to compare it to other Geneanet members’ DNA data, and to find members whith whom they share DNA segments. 

The company, based in France, says you only have to download your raw DNA data from the site of your provider and to upload it to their database. They aim to make it very easy and Geneanet has some help tutorials to aid people who want to take advantage of this European service no matter if you have taken a DNA test kit at AncestryDNA, 23andMe, MyHeritage, FamilyTreeDNA or Living DNA.

Geneanet claims to deal with the rest of it thanks to powerful matching tools.

On thier website they say:

"At Geneanet, we do genealogy, only genealogy. We think that DNA tests are an additional tool for finding new relatives.

Of course, this new service does not replace genealogy research as we do it for years but it’s an additional way of finding new branches and relatives."

See more at: https://en.geneanet.org/genealogyblog/post/2020/02/geneanet-launches-geneanet-dna

For anyone who is looking for a good read then you could do no better than picking up a copy of the new Discover Your Ancestors Issue 9 which has just come off the press and is available now! With articles on tracing your house history, the family history of the cast and the castle of Downton Abbey and items covering criminal gangs to criminal lunatics, it’s a magazine that’s hard to put down.

This is a high quality glossy bookazine with 196-pages of new in-depth articles, research advice, social and general history, ‘how to’ features, case studies, places in focus, and much more! It is ideal for both experienced researchers and those just starting out.

In this volume you will find features on:

• Downton Abbey: the historic location, stars and their family histories 
• Charles Dickens 150th Anniversary
• Celebrity Genealogies: Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Rowan Atkinson
• Peaky Blinders & The Krays: the real history of organised crime gangs
• DNA and how it can pinpoint ancestors’ locations
  and much more!

Also included are over £170 of FREE resources! Including a free online research subscription and a voucher for a free subscription to the monthly online magazine, Discover Your Ancestors Periodical.

Pick up this new release from WHSmiths or go online to S&N Genealogy Supplies where you can also find Discover Your Ancestors Back Issues so you can complete your collection, Periodical Compendiums so you can get up to date with the monthly online magazine, as well as many Books and other new releases from Discover Your Ancestors, including the popular Seven Generation Log Book, 10 Generation Relationship Chart and Birth Year from Census Date Calculator.

https://genealogysupplies.com/

This is the first time that these RAF records are fully searchable by name, aircraft, location and many other fields, making it easier to find your aviation ancestors.

In a release of over half a million records, this is the first batch of RAF Operations Records Books (ORBs) to join TheGenealogist’s ever-expanding military records collection.

 The operations records books are for squadrons primarily after the First World War but there are a few early squadron records from 1911 to 1918.

 These documents tell the stories of these brave aircrew who battled against the odds and give insights into their everyday lives. You can use the collection to follow an airman’s war time experiences from these fully searchable Air Ministry operations record books which cover various Royal Air Force, dominion and Allied Air Force squadrons that came under British Command. The AIR 27 records allow the family history researcher a fascinating insight into their relatives serving in a number of wartime air force units.

In the last week we have been sad to hear of the death of the last surviving Battle of Britain ace pilot from World War Two. Wing Cdr Paul Farnes died aged 101 a few days ago and so it is, therefore, poignant that as one of the last from among the 3,000 airmen – known as The Few – who had defended Britain's skies in 1940 he appears in this release of RAF records from TheGenealogist.

Wing Commander Farnes had six confirmed enemy aircraft destroyed, two shared destroyed, two possible destroyed and 11 damaged in his impressive war time tally making him qualify as an ace (a pilot who shot down five or more enemy planes).

 Wing Commander Paul Farnes   Oem89 [CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]

The records provide summaries of events and can reveal the death of aviators, crashes, as well as less traumatic details such as weather and places patrolled by the planes and where the squadrons were based as the war wore on. As aircrew personnel are named in these reports, those wanting to follow where an ancestor had been posted to and what may have happened to them will find these records extremely informative.

Sgt P.C. Farnes first "kill" recorded in the Operations Record Book for 501 Squadron on TheGenealogist

Of value to researchers are the duties recorded in these documents so that you can find the assignments the men took part in. This includes Bombing, Convoy Escort, Submarine Hunt, Attack Docks & Shipping, Dive Bombing Raids and more.

Use these records to:

●     Add colour to an aircrewman’s story

●     Read the war movements of personnel in air force units

●     Discover if a pilot, navigator, radio operator or gunner is mentioned in the action

●     Find if an airman is listed for receiving an Honour or an Award

●     Note the names of squadron members wounded, killed, or did not return

●     Easily search these National Archives records and images

This expands TheGenealogist’s extensive Military records collection.

Read their article:

https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2020/raf-operations-books-build-a-picture-of-wwii-aircrew-ancestors-action-1231/

These records and many more are available to Diamond subscribers of TheGenealogist.co.uk

Many genealogists and family history researchers will be heading to Bristol for The Family History Show, South West in just a weeks' time!

The show takes place on Saturday 8th February at UWE Exhibition Centre, with two Large Lecture Theatres with Free Talks, Free Ask the Experts Area, Societies, Local Archives and Ministry of Defence stands, Free Goody Bag worth over £8 on entry, Free Parking and Free minibus from Station.

Don't miss their Early Bird Offer, Two Tickets for £8, saving £4 on the door price, which you can claim here.

Not in the South West? Don't worry, they are also coming to York in June and London in September.

The Stirling Affair

The eighth novel in the Morton Farrier genealogical crime series has now been released and getting great reviews on goodreads.com and on Amazon.

The Sterling Affair by author Nathan Dylan Goodwin continues the well recieved set of books about a forensic genealogist.

​When an unannounced stranger comes calling at Morton Farrier’s front door, he finds himself faced with the most intriguing and confounding case of his career to-date as a forensic genealogist. He agrees to accept the contract to identify a man who had been secretly living under the name of his new client’s long-deceased brother. Morton must use his range of resources and research skills to help him deconstruct this mysterious man’s life, ultimately leading him back into the murky world of 1950s international affairs of state. Meanwhile, Morton is faced with his own alarmingly close DNA match which itself comes with far-reaching implications for the Farriers.

This is the eighth novel in the Morton Farrier genealogical crime mystery series of ten stories, although it can be enjoyed as a stand-alone story. Available online and to order.

See the author's website: https://www.nathandylangoodwin.com/

Press Release from TheGenealogist

New Searchable War Memorials

TheGenealogist has just released over 12,000 records from 138 War Memorials. This means that there are now a total of over 580,000 individuals on War Memorials that are fully searchable in TheGenealogist’s Military records with photographs centred on their inscription. These memorials can give researchers an insight into education, rank, regiment and occupation of an ancestor. 

Red Deer 55th Street Cemetery Alberta, Canada - RAF Deaths At Penhold 

The War Memorial records will allow the family history researcher to discover:

• over 12,000 additional individuals recorded on War Memorials 
• additional War Memorials from England and Canada 
• fully searchable records which are transcribed from images of the tributes
• colour images of the memorial centred on their name
• a variety of memorials in honour of the war dead from various conflicts 

The Map Explorer™ on TheGenealogist can also be used to locate all the War Memorials on georeferenced historic and modern maps making them easy to find. The War Memorial database includes names from the Boer War, the First World War and World War II. This latest release from TheGenealogist covers war memorials from various parts of the UK, particularly West Yorkshire, County Durham and East Sussex as well as Canada. 

This new release covers memorials that are not all set in stone or cast in iron. There is the WW1 memorial volume book held in Darlington Central Library for Pease and Partners of Darlington. This firm owned mines, quarries and other works all over County Durham and Teesside. This particular memorial is useful to a researcher wanting to "break down barriers" as it not only gives the rank and regiment of the man, but also gives his place of occupation (which particular mine, quarry, or works they had been employed in) which could aid a researcher to try to get the employment record for an ancestor – the volume is divided into sections for the 543 men who died, over 4,100 who served and details of the medals awarded to 134 of them.

Other employment War Memorials in this release include: Yorks & Lancs Railway locomotive works at Horwich where 122 employees were killed in WW1 and in London the Worshipful Company of Armourers and Braziers recording 37 men who were killed or served in WW1 and WW2.

1914 1919 The Great War: Liverymen and Freemen of the Worshipful Company of Armourers and Brasiers

Additional School and college War Memorials added this time include Petworth Boys school, which commemorates 2 teachers and 28 pupils killed in 1942 when the school was destroyed by enemy action, and King’s College Cambridge where 345 students or former students etc. are commemorated having been killed in both the First and Second World War.

Of further note are War Memorials in Pimlico, London where 67 men from a Peabody Estate who were killed in WW1 are recorded. There is an interesting set of stained glass windows in Grimsby Minster dedicated to 25 Grimsby men lost in WW2 who were members of various clubs such as the Grimsby Cyclists' Club. In this release there is a memorial in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada to 35 men of the RAF killed there during their training and in Eastbourne Town Hall there is a roll of 180 civilians or firefighters etc. killed there in WW2 by enemy action. 

These records are available to Diamond subscribers of TheGenealogist as part of their large Military Records collection.

Read TheGenealogist’s article: Using War Memorials to research ancestors from the First World War

https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2019/using-war-memorials-to-research-ancestors-from-the-first-world-war-1213/