If your ancestor held a prominent position in a religious organisation then you may find them in amongst a number of recent releases at TheGenealogist.co.uk. The new records include:
The Year Book of The Church of England in the Dominion of Canada 1926 & 1935 - These year books contain the details of the members of clergy in Canada.
New Zealand Methodist Union Index 1913 - Listing details of Methodist Ministers and their placements in New Zealand up to 1912.
Catholic Directory 1867 & 1877 - Directories of Catholic Clergy with addresses for England, Scotland and Wales.
Biographical Dictionary of English Catholics 1534 to 1885 - This work by Joseph Gillow gives biographies of prominent Catholics which often include details of their family, education and achievements.
Shropshire Roman Catholic Registers 1763-1837
The Roman Catholics in the County of York 1604
Various Catholic Record Society volumes - These include a variety of interesting records including various Catholic Church registers, memoirs and letters of prominent Catholics and Recusant Rolls.
Jewish Year Books 1896-99, 1901-8, 1910-11, 1918-21, 1925, and 1928-39 - These year books list the details of prominent people within each synagogue, obituaries, Jewish officers in the Army, Navy and Auxiliary Forces, Ministers, MPs, Peers, and even Jewish 'Celebrities' of the time.
Jewish Synagogue Seatholders in London for 1920, 1922, 1925, 1927, 1929, 1931, 1933, 1937
The Clergyman's Almanack 1821 & 1822 - These Almanacks list archbishops, bishops, dignitaries, MPs and Peers.
Register of Missionaries 1796-1923 - A register of the missionaries and deputations of the London Society of Missionaries. This book includes many details about each missionary, as well as listing their wives (including their maiden name).
Durham Diocesan Calendar 1931
These records compliment an already wide range of religious occupational records such as Cox's Clergy Lists and Crockford's Clerical Directories, Jewish Seatholders, Catholic Registers, and Directories already on TheGenealogist.
Diamond subscribers can access these records by going to the Search tab on the home page - scrolling down to Occupational Records and then selecting the type of records that they are interested in.
Go to: TheGenealogist.co.uk.
TheGenealogist have just released over 190,000 records of passengers who departed Britain on early Migrant ships to New South Wales 1828 - 1896These new records expand TheGenealogist’s Immigration,Emigration and Naturalisation and passenger list records.The transcripts of the latest release uniquely give a family link so you can see spouses and children setting out on their new life. They also reveal details such as which ship they had sailed on, where they were landing, the passenger’s occupation and in the case where the migrant has been assisted to travel out to a job, their employer’s name. Some records are more detailed than others and can divulge how much the emigrant was to be paid, whether rations were included in their employment. In some cases the immigrants Native Place, or where they had come from is also disclosed. A number of these settlers may have bought their own passages, while others travelled with assistance from one of the public or private programmes that existed at the time. With the discovery of gold in 1851 mass migration to New South Wales of a wider cross section of people took place.The NSW passenger lists will allow researchers to
Discover ancestors travelling to New South Wales from Britain and Ireland between 1828 and 1896 in the shipping lists of the era
These fully indexed records allow family historians to search by name together with country and port of embarkation, as well as country or port of destination
Find ancestors on “bounty scheme” voyages in which free immigrants to Australia were recruited by agents in Britain, who were paid a monetary reward for finding suitable skilled labour and tradespeople willing to sail out to the new colony
Locate families travelling together with a single click
See linked images and records on the New South Wales Government Website
These records can be found within the Immigration, Emigration and Travel collection on TheGenealogist and add significantly to the resources already available for researchers to use when looking for ancestors who left Britain. TheGenealogist’s extensive British & International Immigration and Emigration records, already include Naturalisation and Denization records, convict registers and early New Zealand settlers.
Search the records now at: http://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/search/advanced/overseas/passenger-lists/An example from the records follows below…By selecting Immigration, Emigration and Travel on TheGenealogist’s main search page and then choosing Passenger Lists from the dropdown menu, we are able to look for William Fortune and his young wife who set out for a new life in New South Wales departing from London on the 13th February 1841 on board the ship the Jane Gifford. The detailed records confirm the departure date, the ship’s name and much much more. For example we are able to discover that William was from Newbridge, that he was a labourer aged 28 and a Roman Catholic. We can see that he was heading for Sydney, Australia and that William had been engaged by one Captain Flint at a wage of £19 a year.Presumably William’s prospective employer, Captain Flint, was not the template for Robert Louis Stevenson’s Piratical character of the same name, who would appear in print forty years later. As the shipping records also reveals to us that William Fortune could neither read nor write, this fictional person with the same name as his boss may well have passed him by in the years to come.An extremely powerful feature, of searching the passenger lists on TheGenealogist’s website, is the ability to look for a family travelling together. One click on the family group icon, next to William’s results, returns potential family members. We can see that his 19 year old wife, Susan, was also travelling with him. Her occupation is noted as a House Maid and she too was a Roman Catholic from Newbridge. Another charming nugget of family history information revealed, by the Potential Family Members search, is that on the voyage William and Susan were delivered of a baby girl. Their child, Jane Fortune, was born at sea with her native place being prosaically listed simply as “Sea” on the passenger list. Jane is recorded as being aged 2 months and has then been pedantically noted in the records as being “under age”.The passenger lists available on TheGenealogist can reveal a significant amount of information about ancestors that have emigrated to New South Wales in the 19th century. As we can see, from the example above, the unique ability to search for relatives travelling together is a compelling reason to use TheGenealogist to research for immigrants down under.
The Society of Genealogists has added the evidence records of those candidates taking the Civil Service examinations, between 1855 and 1939, to their SoG Data Online. Members of the Society will be able to view the original documents, after logging in, while non-members can search for a name in the collection, but are not able to view the documents.
The records were originally created when candidates for the examinations had to provide proof that they were at least 21 years old. The evidence, which they submitted, very often would have been their birth certificate or sometimes a certified extract from a baptismal register. In some cases these documents were simply not available and so all manner of alternative evidence was produced, such as Indian horoscopes drawn up at a child’s birth.
The SoG says that the geographical spread of the collection is extremely wide with many births recorded from Ireland, the Channel Islands, Malta and Gibraltar plus others for British people who were born all over the world and especially in India.
The surviving documents only include evidence of birth for a small proportion of Civil Servants, some 60,000 people in all. However the collection may provide vital evidence of an ancestor’s birth date that would be difficult or impossible to prove otherwise and so break down a brick wall.
I was intrigued to read on TheGenelaogist's website, that their researchers have discovered the real story of James Freeman, as played by Russell Tovey in the BBC TV series Banished. As they say in their article "Freeman's real story is fascinating, if a bit gruesome."
I won't spoil it for you, as you can read it all by heading over to their featured articles on their website here:
http://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2015/hang-or-be-hanged-the-finisher-of-the-law-237/
What I can tell you is that the Transportation records to be found on TheGenealogist website is a fabulous resource for discovering convict ancestors that this country wanted to send away "to parts beyond the seas".
Latest news from The National Archives is the final set of records relating to' colonial administration' will be available to view in the reading rooms at the TNA from Friday 29 November 2013. Within this new release are records from Malta, Singapore, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda, West Indies and many other countries. The National Archives have been working with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to transfer and release these colonial administration records.
The material reflects events in the territories generally (pre-independence from Britain) and Her Majesty's Government's views at that time. If you had an ancestor or relative living or originating from these countries, the new release of records may be a useful read to find out more about life in that country at that particular point in time.
There's more information available from The National Archives website at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/news/890.htm
Written by experienced family historian, David T Hawkins, to commemorate the 225th anniversary in 2012 of the sailing of the eleven vessels of the First Fleet from England, bound for Australia, this book is a must read for all those with any Australian ancestors.
From the arrival of the first 778 convicts in 1788, to the end of transportation in 1868, a staggering 165,000 criminals were sent to Australia for a range of crimes.In addition to those transported, hundreds of thousands of free persons emigrated from Britain and Ireland to colonies in Australia. With the vast distance involved, few people returned and many now have descendants living in Australia.
Tracing those descendants can be a huge task and that's were this book is so useful. First of all it looks at convict records - what to search for, the types of records that can be located and the actual court record proceedings with some actual examples.There's also admiralty records of the 'hulks' the prisoners were stored upon and then the ships they were transported upon.
The book looks at the voyage to Australia, giving a fascinating insight into the tough journey. Aside from convicts there is a look into other early settlers, records of officials and examples of those people who returned to Britain.
The book is a recommended useful guidebook for those people looking to trace Australian ancestry or who may have discovered a relative who was convicted and transported in the late 1700s and early 1800s. It's very thorough and provides useful pointers for what you can find and where to search to find those all important records. The book is available priced £20 from S&N Genealogy Supplies at the S&N Genealogy website.
Latest news from the National Archives is the proposed new release of more colonial administration records, covering the many territories under British administration before they gained independence. The National Archives is working with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to transfer and begin releasing these records, referred to as the 'migrated archives', between April 2012 and November 2013.The records cover a wide range of subject matter relating to colonial administration. The material reflects events in the territories generally pre-independence and reflects Her Majesty's Government's views at the time.The records are being released in tranches. The fifth tranche of files will be made available on site at The National Archives from Friday 26 April 2013. This release will contain records from Ceylon, Kenya, Malta, Mauritius, New Hebrides, Nigeria, Northern Rhodesia, Nyasaland, Palestine, Sierra Leone and Singapore.
Well worth taking a look if you had ancestors living in these countries pre-independence! There's more on the National Archives website.