by Peter Bennett

I see that it has been ten years since I started this column.  In 1999 I celebrated the addition of name indexes to the 1851 census for London, and a single index on microfiche to the entire 1881 census of England and Wales.  Family history has moved on apace in that ten years, so that these resources now seem like ancient history.

That is not to say they do not have their place now, for the searcher who does not find his or her ancestor in any of the online indexes should still reach for those printed efforts done by family historians who went before us.  Just as the different indexes which now come to us down the line will all have variations, so the traditional means of delivering that information should still have a place in our research program.

Over the years the items I have noted have been increasingly Internet based, and there is no doubt that these are delivering a mass of information which we could only dream of back in 1999, and it gets more so.  Still, I hope that I will still be able to throw in the occasional book which will give someone that leg up in their research.  So now to the present, and what has been happening over here.

The changes at The National Archives at Kew are now in place, with the building closed to researchers on Mondays, and car parking charges due to take effect from April.  As I write there are also about to be changes taking place inside, the main one being the removal of many of the reels of microfilm, including the census returns.  They will, happily, still be onsite and we will be able to order them up.  There has been more than one occasion when film of the original has been more use than the online provision, such as attempting to make out faded ink, especially in the 1841 census.  And if a family is not to be found where they are expected then it might be that the page, or even a larger part of the parish, has been missed by indexers somewhere along the line.  Microfilm might just be what you need to prove this.

TNA are disposing of their indexes to the births, marriages and deaths since 1837, but now we are told that they are going to the London Metropolitan Archives, who will also receive updated indexes from the General Register Office.  Although the indexes are available online to 2005, indexes to recent events are still being produced on microfiche and it is useful to know that these will continue to be available in London.  There have been murmurings again that the GRO are to restart their program to digitise the records, but past experience suggests that it will be a long time before anything comes of this. 

While at the London Metropolitan Archives, a recent newsletter announces that they are to digitise the records of the Middlesex Deeds Registry.  These records run from 1709 to 1938 and provided for the registration of deeds, conveyances, etc. which affect freehold and some leasehold lands.  The present indexes are by the name of the vendor or first party only, so a digitised version, presumably searchable by all names, would be a huge advance in making these records more useful.  There is as yet no timetable for this project, but it will be worth looking out for.

Your own Karen Stewart beat me in the last edition of ‘The Genealogist’  to the news of the Welsh wills to 1858 which are now online courtesy of the National Library of Wales.  For anyone with Welsh ancestry, and not forgetting that some people from Shropshire will appear in these too, then this free site is a must.  You can read images of all the wills, and administrations, and searching is easy.  I only know of Norfolk probate records which are also available like this, and I have used those successfully in the past.

Karen also mentioned the release by Ancestry of indexes to marriages here from 1916 to 2005.  These have now been joined by a similar index to the deaths, so now we have births, marriages and deaths indexed online from 1837 to 2005.  The combination makes for much more effective searching, and the ability to build up a more complete family tree from these records.  The same old caveat applies, however, to beware spelling errors.  These can occur both in the indexes which were compiled at the time, and in the transfer of them to databases.  But there are some alternatives, most notably the local indexes to these records which are being built up and can be found at UKBMD, www.ukbmd.org.uk 

The Ancestry organisation has also completed the indexing of the surviving First World War service records of soldiers held in classes WO363 and WO364 at The National Archives.  A further smaller group is still only at TNA in class PIN26, these being records of pensions awarded.  With the destruction of many of the regular service records  those in PIN26 are often all that remains.  But despite all of this, there is still only about a one in three chance of finding any sort of service record for a soldier.

The records which are all but complete are the Medal Index Cards.  These can be viewed either at the ‘Documents Online’ section of TNA’s site, or on Ancestry, but it is worth bearing in mind that the latter have both sides of each card.  The reverse of the record for officers in particular can have additional information, especially addresses.  The cards have references by each award which lead into registers in class WO329.  The relevant register can now be determined by entering the Index Card references into a catalogue search at TNA.  This is going to save some time working out the correct volume once at Kew, but at present the entries in the volumes cannot be seen online.

Not that the volumes generally add anything of use, but there is just the occasional additional snippet, especially when a service record does not survive.  The battalion number within the regiment will be of great help to those who want to go on to discover the relevant war diary, and this is generally shown in the medal volume.  I have also seen home addresses given, and notes of death.

Research here is often helped along with a map of the area of interest, and we might want it for the names of nearby parishes, or registration districts, or other administrative boundaries.  I have recently come across a section of Familysearch which has just the thing.  At maps.familysearch.org you can view the arrangement of a county from any number of aspects, from hundred to deanery to parish and a number of others.  Just select the ‘layer’ you want and it all comes up before you.  Or enter the name of a parish and a description will be brought up, with a map showing your parish and all of those nearby.  If you are wanting to look for those elusive ancestors in the adjacent parishes then these maps are ideal.

I don’t think we even dreamt of such riches ten years ago, but just these few items have the ability to push the boundaries of our research.  Some might even cause us to look again at an entry we were never quite sure of, for we all need to keep a close eye to make sure there is nothing to make the line of descent at all doubtful.

You have to wonder how we will be doing all this in another ten years…