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Pinpoint your English and Welsh Ancestors on the map

TheGenealogist has announced the completion of its project to link all the National Tithe Record Collection for England & Wales with its powerful Map Explorer™.

 

Family historians are now able to view their ancestors’ land and homes plotted on historic Tithe maps that have been georeferenced, allowing you to see the location on today's Modern Street and Satellite maps to see how the area has developed over time. 

 

 

Tithe record books and maps cover the majority of England and Wales and were created by the 1836 Tithe Commutation Act. This required tithes in kind to be converted to monetary payments, known as tithe rentcharges. The Tithe Survey was established to find out which areas were subject to tithes, who owned them, who occupied the various parcels of land, the usage of the land, how much was payable and to whom. These maps and apportionment books were the product of that survey and have been digitised by TheGenealogist.

 

Tithes usefully record all levels of society, from wealthy landowners to tenant farmers and cover the majority of England and Wales. They are a valuable resource for family and house historians as they can provide insights into land and property ownership, occupancy and usage, dating back before the first searchable census. 

 

TheGenealogist has painstakingly georeferenced their tithe maps, which means you can view them layered on top of modern day maps and satellite images, using their intuitive Map Explorer™. This allows you to pinpoint a record to the exact same location on various historical and modern maps, even when the landscape has completely changed over the years.

“This final release of the Welsh tithes marks the completion of our project.These records, in combination with Map Explorer, make it easier than ever to learn about our ancestors’ lives and the places they lived and worked.” Mark Bayley, Head of Online Content at TheGenealogist.

This week’s release adds to the many types of records that can be viewed in Map Explorer™. This includes the Lloyd George Domesday land tax records, the UK census 1871-1911, the 1939 Register, the Headstone Collection, War Memorials and the Image Archive.

To learn more about TheGenealogist’s powerful Map Explorer™, please visit https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/maps/

Feature Article Case Study

 

Read our feature article where we use the records on Map Explorer™ to take a look at Thomas Rees, an agricultural labourer, leader of the first Rebecca Riots and, under a unique Welsh tradition, a freeholder of a cottage that he built in one night!
https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2023/found-in-the-welsh-tithe-records-the-cottage-built-in-one-night-6801/

 

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!

TheGenealogist has added Colour Tithe Maps from The National Archives to their National Tithe Records collection. With this release researchers can see the plots owned or occupied by ancestors that lived in this ‘home county’ at the time of the survey in the 19th century.

The new data includes:

• Over 40,000 Plots of Land covering the years from 1837 to 1855 with some much later plans of altered apportionments
• Joining the apportionment record books and the previously published greyscale maps

These tagged colour maps and their fully searchable tithe schedule records are from those held at The National Archives. The collection gives the family history researcher the ability to search by name and keyword (for example parish or county) to look for all levels of society from large estate owners to occupiers of tiny plots such as a cottage or a cowshed.

Read TheGenealogist’s article: https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2018/buckinghamshires-colour-tithe-maps-online-748/

Detailed Town and Parish Maps go online for the first time

This exciting information has just been released by TheGenealogist:

TheGenealogist has added maps to its comprehensive National Tithe Records collection.

All aspects of society were captured by this survey

• Identify the land your ancestors owned or occupied in the 19th century

• Get an idea of their working lives by the usage made of the plots by your forebears.

• Fully linked tithe maps for Middlesex, Surrey, Buckinghamshire and Leicestershire with other counties to follow shortly

• Geographically placing where your ancestors worked and lived

• In partnership with TNA, TheGenealogist is making it possible to search over 11,000,000 records from across England and Wales and to view theses valuable original apportionment documents with linked maps on one website.

It’s always been a challenge to find where our ancestors lived, but now these records can help you explore the fields and houses in their home villages and towns. Never before have family historians been able search nationwide for these ancestral maps. We plan to have complete coverage in the next few months.

Tithe maps allow you to pinpoint your ancestors from our records. They show the boundaries of fields, woods, roads, rivers and the location and shape of buildings. The detail recorded within the maps and apportionment records will show you how much land they owned or occupied, where exactly in the parish it was, what the land was used for and how much tithe rent there was to pay.

The Tithe Commissioners maps are now housed in The National Archives (TNA). Due to their age and the materials used the original maps are often too fragile to handle. These were microfilmed in 1982 and some of the maps have deteriorated over the last 30 years. The first stage of the project is the release of these as online images.

There are over 12,000 main maps plus thousands of update maps as the boundaries of fields changed over time.

The second stage will be the delicate conservation and digitisation of the original colour maps.

“Tithe records are a rich resource for family historians as they cover owners and occupiers of land from all strata of early Victorian society.

These maps can be three to four meters in length by several meters in width and have gone through a multiple levels of digitisation and processing so that the huge maps can load instantly, even on a mobile phone. This fantastic resource was created in the period from 1837 to the early 1850s as a result of one of the largest surveys into the usage, ownership and occupation of land in England and Wales since the Domesday book.”

Mark Bayley - Head of Online Content at TheGenealogist

Diamond subscribers to TheGenealogist are able to view apportionment records for all of England & Wales, with the accompanying maps now being live for Middlesex, Surrey, Buckinghamshire and Leicestershire. The maps for the rest of England and Wales will follow over the coming months.

See their page TheGenealogist.co.uk/Tithe to freely search the records and learn more about them.

Here is an example provided by TheGenalogist:

Sir Robert Peel in the Tithe records.

We can look for Sir Robert Peel in Middlesex, a county that covered some of the area we would now think of as London. By selecting Landowner Records and then from the drop down menu Tithe Records we then enter Robert Peel into the name fields.

In 1854 Sir Robert, twice Prime Minister of the country and creator of the modern police force, was the occupier of land that was owned by the Earl of Listowell in St Margaret’s, Westminster.

By clicking on the Transcription icon we can then see the names of both the owner and occupier, the date it was entered into the records and the plot number on the plan.

The image of the apportionment reveals that it is a house: No. 22 Princess Gate.

By clicking on the map icon will quickly zoom the researcher in to see the plot on the plan. You can then use the magnify buttons to move in and out to see the plots in relation to the full plan of the parish.

Tithes are a rich resource for family historians to find their ancestors within. The records and maps cover owners and occupiers of land from all strata of society in early Victorian times.

For a special offer of £20 off TheGenealogist Diamond Subscription go to:

www.thegenealogist.co.uk/tithe20

With the launch of over 11 million new Tithe Records now available on TheGenealogist, it's now possible to discover more details on our ancestors before the census record years. Available online for the first time, TheGenealogist, in partnership with The National Archives, has released these unique records, which show life in England and Wales from the 1830s. Amongst the new discoveries,  the ancestors of Monty Python legends, John Cleese and Eric Idle are found in the Tithe records, as can the shared ancestor of Prince Harry and his girlfriend, Cressida Bonas. Both are related to Richard William Penn Curzon-Howe (1st Earl Howe). Earl Howe owned a substantial amount  of land in both Suffolk and Buckinghamshire (the family ancestral home). Here is a copy of Earl Howe and his details in the Tithe Apportionment record now available to view online.

The shared family tree of Harry and Cressida can be found on TreeView. The great great Grandfather of John Cleese was a grocer, and is discovered in the Tithe Records living in a cottage in Westbury-upon-Trym. The father of John Cleese, Reginald, changed the family name from Cheese to Cleese before he joined the army in World War One. The Cheese/Cleese family tree is listed here.  Fellow Python Eric Idle's ancestors hail from Lower Soothill in Yorkshire. Eric's three times great Grandfather was a blanket maker by profession and lived with his family in a cottage and shop with gardens as found in the tithe records. The Idle family tree can also be found here on TreeView. Other discoveries in the Tithe records include the ancestors of Lord Seb Coe, former athlete, whose relative, Robert Coe, a school headmaster, is  found on the Tithe records in Durham. See the family history of Lord Coe onTreeView . The Tithe Maps are to be added to TheGenealogist later in 2014. The Maps were the graphical representation of who owned or occupied the land and property in England and Wales. The second phase of the project will link images of microfilm maps with the plot references. Launch is due Spring 2014. The third phase will digitise the large original maps in colour for each county at high resolution to enhance this unique resource. Launch due for this is 2015. Mark Bayley, Head of Online Content at TheGenealogist concludes: “This has been an exciting, major project for us. The records touch upon the lives of every family so they really are a must–have for every family historian!”

The Tithe Records now available on TheGenealogist have been mentioned in a number of British newspapers including The Sunday Times, The Daily Express and The Telegraph.