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New website for family, social historians and those interested in women's history has been launched online at: A Few Forgotten Women

The creators of the A Few Forgotten Women Project are a group of friends, known collectively as A Few Good Women. On their new website they say they are united by their friendship, love of different aspects of family and local history and a passion for preserving the past.

A Few Forgotten Women

The aim of their project, acording to the welcome they have written on their website, is "to preserve the memory of some women who have, until now, been hiding in the shadows, forgotten by history. The women that you will meet here are those that we have discovered during our investigations into our own ancestry, as part of a one-name study, a one-place study, or when undertaking a wider project. Then there are the women that had no link to our own work but who cried out to us as we researched in the documents of the past. We hope that you will want to learn about the women whose stories we share."

https://afewforgottenwomen.wixsite.com/affw/post/welcome-to-a-few-forgotten-women

More than 185,000 new Lloyd George Domesday land tax records have been added by TheGenealogist to its Landowner and Occupier records. Consisting of records from the counties of Berkshire and the Buckinghamshire, this release provides researchers with the ability to discover owners and occupiers of property in the period 1910 to 1915.

Covering an area of over 800 square miles, researchers can use these records to see the size, state of repair and value of the house in which their ancestors had been the landlord of, or had lived in. 

IR126 Map of Ascot on TheGenealogist’s Map Explorer™ 

TheGenealogist has linked all the records to the large scale Ordnance Survey maps that were used at the time.These detailed maps show each property plotted on detailed mapping that can be viewed with TheGenealogist’s Map Explorer™ tool. This interface will show the same coordinates on a variety of modern and historical maps. Using this allows house or family historians to see how the area they are researching may have changed over time and with it to then explore their ancestors' locality.

• Details of Individual properties can be found in these Lloyd George Domesday records
  

• Records are linked to extremely detailed maps used in 1910-1915 and viewable on the powerful Map Explorer™ 
  

• Ability to fully search the records by a person’s name, county, parish and street
  

• The Ordnance Survey maps zoom down to show individual properties
  

• Georeferenced to a modern street map or satellite map underlay the researcher can more clearly understand what the area looks like today
  

Areas covered in this release include:

Aldermaston, Aldworth, Amersham, Arborfield, Ardington, Ashampstead, Ashley Green, Barkham, Basildon, Beaconsfield, Beech Hill, Beedon, Beenham, Binfield, Bisham, Bledlow, Blewbury, Boveney, Boxford, Bradenham, Bradfield, Bray, Brightwalton, Brimpton, Buckland, Bucklebury, Burghfield, Burnham, Catmore, Caversham, Chaddleworth, Chalfont St Giles, Chalfont St Peter, Challow (East and West), Charlton, Chenies, Chepping Wycombe, Chesham, Chieveley, Childrey, Chilton, Cholesbury, Clewer Within, Clewer Without, Cold Ash, Compton, Cookham, Crowthorne, Datchet, Denchworth, Denham, Donnington, Earley, East Garston, East Ilsley, East Lockinge, East Shefford, Easthampstead, Ellesborough, Enborne, Englefield, Eton, Farnborough, Farnham Royal, Fawley, Fawley, Fawley, Finchhampstead, Fingest, Frilsham, Fulmer, Gerrards Cross, Goosey, Grazeley, Great Coxwell, Great Missenden, Greenham, Grove, Hambleden, Hampden (Great and Little), Hampstead Marshall, Hampstead Norris, Hanney (East and West), Harwell, Hawridge, Hedgerley, Hedsor, Hendred (East and West), High Wycombe, Hitcham, Horsenden, Horton, Hungerford, Hurley, Ibstone, Ilmer, Inkpen, Iver, Kimble (Great and Little), Kintbury, Lambourn, Langley, Leckhampstead, Lee, Letcombe Bassett, Letcombe Regis, Little Marlow, Little Missenden, Maidenhead, Marlow, Medmenham, Midgham, Mortimer, New Windsor, Newbury, Newland, Old Windsor, Pangbourne, Peasemore, Penn, Princes Risborough, Remenham, Ruscombe, Sandhurst, Saunderton, Shaw, Shinfield, Shottesbrook, Slough, Slough, Sparsholt, Speen, St Giles, St Lawrence, St Mary, St Nicholas Hurst, Stanford Dingley, Streatley, Sunningdale, Sunninghill, Swallowfield, Taplow, Thatcham, Theale, Tilehurst, Towersey, Turville, Twyford, Upton, Waltham St Lawrence, Wantage, Warfield, Wargrave, Welford, West Ilsley, West Shefford, West Woodhay, White Waltham, Winkfield, Winnersh, Winterbourne, Wokingham, Wooburn, Woolhampton & Yattendon

Read TheGenealogist’s article: To the Cottage Born https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2022/to-the-cottage-born-1645/ 

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!

Saturday 10 December 2022 a 1 hour talk online from the Society of Genealogists 2pm to 3pm GMT

This event will be recorded and everyone who books a place will receive a link to watch the recording at a later date.

About the speaker: Dr Ian Mortimer is the author of twelve history books, two volumes of historical documents, four novels, three other books, and numerous articles on the history of England between the tenth and twentieth centuries.  

Where did my ancestors live? Were the shops, churches and pubs nearby? 

These questions and more are now easier than ever to answer using TheGenealogist. This online family history website has just linked all of its 1881 census records of England, Scotland and Wales to its powerful Map Explorer™ so that users can see the locations of houses plotted on georeferenced historic and modern map layers.

Uniquely on TheGenealogist viewing a household record from the 1881 census will now show a map pinpointing its location. Clicking on this pin opens Map Explorer™, enabling subscribers to explore the area and see the records of neighbouring properties.

With this new release family and house historians are able to research the streets, lanes and neighbourhoods in which their ancestors had lived at the time of the 1881 census. Joining earlier releases that saw the 1911, 1901 and 1891 census linked to the powerful mapping tool, researchers can easily identify with just the click of a button, where their forebears had once lived. 

With properties plotted on a map researchers can see the routes their ancestors could have used to get to the shops, drop into their local pubs, worship at their nearby churches, travel to their places of work and relax with a walk in the nearby park. Historical maps make it possible to find where the nearest railway station was to their home, important for understanding how our ancestors could have travelled to other parts of the country to see relatives or visit their hometown.

Using this powerful resource, Starter, Gold and Diamond subscribers of TheGenealogist can investigate their ancestors’ neighbourhood from home on their computer screens, or even access the census and the relevant maps on their mobile phone while walking down the modern streets.

The majority of the London area and other towns and cities can be viewed down to the property level, while other parts of the country will identify down to the parish, road or street.

Charles Darwin’s home, Downe House

See TheGenealogist’s article: Darwin at Downe

https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2022/darwin-at-downe-1637/ 

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!

As we prepare to remember our fallen hereos from the World Wars and other conflicts on Remembrance Day this weekend, TheGenealogist has released a collection of war memorials for soldiers that had served in the First World War. Comprising of details for men who had been born in Ireland as well as in England, Scotland and Wales with connections with the island of Ireland.

With almost 50,000 records that were originally compiled by the Committee of the Irish National War Memorial and published in 1923. Assembled at the time by Miss Eva C. Barnard, secretary to the Irish National War Memorial Committee and printed under the direction and personal supervision of George Roberts they are presented with attractive decorative borders designed by Harry Clarke.

This eight volume set of Ireland's memorial records, 1914-1918, was published in 1923 for the Committee of the Irish National War Memorial. Each entry gives name, regiment, rank, date and place of death, sometimes date of birth and next of kin.

Read TheGenealogist’s feature article: Remembering the Fallen

https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2022/remembering-the-fallen-1633/

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

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!

Press Release written by the Society of Genealogists:

At last, the news that so many of you have been waiting for – we can finally announce our new home! We are delighted to inform you that we picked up the keys for Unit 2, 40 Wharf Road, London, N1 7GS this week and have started to plan its refurbishment as a wonderful library, archive and social venue for genealogists, local and family historians.

The venue is easily accessible from Euston, Kings Cross and Paddington, and we will keep you up to date with our progress. We estimate that the Society will reopen at the site in the Summer of 2023.

As many of you may be aware, The Society had sold its previous premises at Charterhouse Buildings several years ago and finally vacated the site in October 2021, having packed up its immense holdings into storage temporarily.

We have been operating out of temporary offices in the old Jones Brothers Department Store on Holloway Road, with a retrieval system and visits which can be booked on Wednesdays. We've also continued to welcome our valued volunteer team to the site on Fridays.

We very much look forward to welcoming everyone back to a new refreshed and revitalised Society in 2023. New premises are just one part of the ambitious transformation programme that we’ve been undertaking over the past eighteen months.

The Society also hopes to welcome partners in the genealogy community, academics, local, family and social historians through its doors. We are looking forward to holding another youth conference as well as a conference exploring African and Caribbean disaporas in September as part of the events marking Windrush 75. Our ambition is for this building to become a destination venue, where we shall hold exhibitions, conferences, courses and continue to promote genealogy and family history.

Dr Wanda Wyporska

Chief Executive

Society of Genealogists

TheGenealogist launches fully searchable copies of The Times, to join its ever growing Newspapers and Magazines Collection. This release sees 3,129 editions from the 1870s decade join the many other newspaper publications already available to search on TheGenealogist. Keep a look out for further decades to be released in the coming months of this famous name-rich newspaper of record. 

The Thunderer, as it was nicknamed, like many other newspapers carried Birth, Marriage and Death announcements and so is a great resource for finding details of our ancestors and where they lived.

Discovering our forebears recorded in this newspaper may surprise some researchers. Inclusion in its pages may be because our ancestor was the victim or a witness to a crime. They may have worked as a police officer, lawyer or been a member of the court that had been a part of a legal case reported on by The Times. 

Some ancestors may have warranted their name in print in this hallowed publication on being newly qualified and joining a professional body, for example The Royal College of Surgeons.

But it is not just the great and the good that appear in The Times as all sorts appear in its pages. For example the parties to divorce cases are ordinary people from across the country. You can read who was the petitioner, respondent and co-respondent, giving a researcher some useful information. Often included is the county in which the couple had lived and an occupation for the man. 

For example, in the edition for Friday 10 June 1870 is a case where a man’s wife had left home to live with another. We discover that the petitioner was employed “at some works at Burslem, in Staffordshire'' while the co-respondent in the case was a grocer’s assistant. 

Read TheGenealogist’s article: Times Past https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2022/times-past-1629/ 

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!

Maps are one of the most important visual aids that a family, social or house historian can turn to when exploring the homes of our ancestors. We may have already come across a record that has provided us with an address, or maybe all we have is just a place name, and we want to explore the surrounding streets or the area.

Tithe map of Sedbergh, Yorkshire courtesy of The National Archives

There are various types of map resources that we can use to step back in time, get a better understanding of the landscape that our ancestors would have been living in. By seeing the environment in which they had once lived enables us to see roads, rivers and railways that can explain where they moved on to, or where they had come from in the first place. 

Another line that we may research with the use of a map is for determining employment opportunities for people who had lived in a particular place in a particular time. The map could show us employment opportunities whether they were farms, mills, mines or some type of industrial building such as factories, distilleries, breweries and so on that had attracted our ancestors to live in that place.

Colour Tithe map of the Parish of St Cuthbert in York

Maps can reveal other fascinating information that can be useful in our research, for example we can often see who the landowners were and a historical map allows us to work out the nearest church or nonconformist chapel to where our ancestors lived. With this knowledge the researcher can then look for their forebears' baptisms, marriages and burials in the relevant records connected to that church/chapel.

We can use a range of maps from modern street maps of City & Town maps to historical maps drawn up in the past. Often the problem with a modern map is that they only show us the lay of the land as it is today and not as it may have been when our forebears walked the highways and byways of the area that we are investigating. Many places have seen significant changes over the years with modern redevelopments replacing previous settlements or roads that had first been laid out in medieval times.

A useful set of maps for investigation where an early Victorian era English or Welsh ancestor may have lived are the Tithe Maps. The Tithe Survey which was responsible for the creation of the Tithe Maps was as a result of  the Tithe Commutation Act 1836 and covered a large part of the country that was still subject to tithes and had not been enclosed. These maps and their accompanying apportionment books can be used to discover where people were living and who their neighbours were in the period of the survey from 1836 to the 1850s. Three sets were made of each area, one for the parish, one for the diocese and one for the Tithe Commissioners in London. This last set is in the safekeeping of The National Archives at Kew and have been digitised and put online by commercial family history website TheGenealogist. The parish and diocese maps are likely to be at the diocesan archive which may not necessarily be the county record office for the town/area that you are researching as some ecclesiastical dioceses' boundaries included parts of neighbouring counties. Tithe maps include both owners and occupier’s names and so are useful for family historians  delving into their family history. The maps can often show details such as boundaries, roads, waterways, buildings and woodlands. Sometimes these Victorian era maps show other details such as hedges, field names, mines and factories.

What maps can I use to research my ancestors’ stories?

There have been many maps drawn up over time. Some of these maps are more useful to us than others for researching our family history, although there can be occasions we need to consult a more specialist map such as when doing a house history. A list of maps that a family, social or house historian could use can be seen at https://www.map-explorer.co.uk/

Many of these maps can be found in the local County Record Office though quite a few, but not all, are becoming available on the internet. 

One of the most useful tools for family, social and house historians is the powerful online Map Explorer™ that is accessed on the subscription website TheGenealogist. Boasting a number of georeferenced historic as well as modern maps this resource allows its users to see the plots relating to historical records, such as the Tithe Survey and then fade between the different map layers. Because the historic and modern maps are matched to the same coordinates the researcher can view where an ancestor may have once occupied a small cottage and garden, or even a large estate with many fields, woods and so on. Once found it is then easy to use this tool to see what is there today. As urban boundaries have encroached the countryside it is sometimes fascinating to see how rural what we now see as city suburbs was in our ancestors’ time. 

Map Explorer™ with its georeferenced historical and modern maps includes not only Tithe Records and Maps to look for your Victorian ancestors’ homes, but also Inland Revenue Valuation Office (Lloyd George Domesday Survey) Records and Maps for nearly one million individuals. Other useful record set layers include Census records, Headstones and War memorials and the mapping interface now also allows users the ability to also see what their ancestors’ towns and areas in the U.K. had once looked like as it now includes historical pictures. This sees the addition of period photographs of street scenes and parish churches where researchers' ancestors may have been baptised, married and buried, added to the maps as a recordset layer. The various images for an area have their locations pinpointed on the maps, allowing family historians to explore their ancestors’ hometowns and other landmarks from around their area.

Important repositories of maps include:

The National Archives

Ruskin Avenue,

Kew,

Richmond,

Surrey TW9 4DU https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk

British Library at St. Pancras

96 Euston Road,

London NW1 2DB https://www.bl.uk/

Bodleian Library

Broad Street,

Oxford OX1 3BG https://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/