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by Peter Bennett
Published in the March 2008 edition of
"The Genealogist"
| They say that the best things in life are worth
waiting for, and as far as the British Library goes, they certainly are. I have over the last couple of years mentioned the project to digitise part of the newspaper collection of the BL, and at last a start has been made. And what an amazing start it is. There are 48 titles now fully searchable, from all over the United Kingdom. They come from Aberdeen to Exeter, with Manchester, Newcastle, Oxford, Belfast and Derby, and many other points in between. Some London titles are included, but these are not all simply daily or weekly papers. We have ‘The Era’, the paper from the world of entertainment, some Chartist titles and the ‘Illustrated Police News’, so there is something here for almost anyone. Most of this collection has been digitised for the complete 19th century, with a few back into the 1700s but some starting well after 1800. A search can be narrowed down to a region or a specific title, so there is plenty of scope. But in addition to this collection of 19th century newspapers, the Library’s Burney collection of 17th and 18th century papers has also been digitised. This is a group of over 1,200 titles and they can be searched with the 19th century index, or on their own. I have tried a few searches and the Burney collection adds a significant percentage to the number of hits, so it is clearly a major help to research. The only trouble for you people in Australia is that the newspapers can only be searched on the computers within the British Library. It might be that one day the BL will licence others to access the collection off-site but meanwhile for us over here it is going to be very useful indeed. And mind you, this is only the beginning. The current BL action plan includes a proposal to put half as many newspapers again online by the end of 2009. With the long-term plan to close down the Newspaper Library, as well as to secure the preservation of the newspaper collection, we family historians can only welcome the digitisation of these files. Elsewhere we are seeing the running down of the Family Records Centre. The number of visitors seems to be decreasing all the time. I should think that most people will not want to do lengthy searches of the birth, marriages and death indexes by fiche and are already getting used to using the online versions. But at Kew they are getting ready to welcome more visitors once the FRC closes and much building work is taking place. All certificates are now ordered by post or online, and there is no London collection point. Certificates can be collected from the General Register Office at Southport, but while that will be a help to the relatively few people who live up there, it is of limited use to anyone else. I should think about as useful as your Melbourne registry closing down the Collins Street office and reopening with a collection facility in Mildura. But more and more material is coming to us down the telephone line to our computers. The National Archives continues to expand their online catalogue with detailed listings of the contents. There are now references from the indexes to divorces, class J78. The indexes commence in 1858 with the formation of the Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes, and name both parties with the name of the co-respondent, if any. The online index picks up all the names mentioned, so now we can discover if an ancestor was named in a divorce court! This might not be the sort of family history some people are looking for, but it will surely add colour to any tale. The full divorce files to 1938 are at Kew, the index providing the reference. The nonconformist registers are also now available to search online, at BMDregisters. The records are held at The National Archives and most appear on the IGI. But the registers of The Protestant Dissenters’ Registry at Dr. Williams’s Library, founded 1742, and The Wesleyan Methodist Metropolitan Registry, from 1818, rarely come up on the IGI but have been included in the index compiled by S & N Genealogy in co-operation with TNA. So this new venture will bring up many baptisms which until now have been on the ‘missing presumed lost forever’ list. In the future the records of the Quakers and of Britons abroad will be included in this index. These are another two groups of records which will doubtless hold many surprises for genealogists who had never thought to look in these places. The Quaker records in particular are fascinating. Their marriage entries often name the parents of the bride and groom, including places of residence of all of these people, and can come with long lists of witnesses to the event, many of whom will be related to the couple. On the printed word front there has been a major contribution by Anthony Camp. For many years he has been researching the illegitimate offspring of the Royal family and he has now published ‘Royal Mistresses and Bastards, Fact and Fiction 1714-1936’. He has conducted exhaustive research and put together a very detailed account of the likely and not so likely connections to the Royal family. There are Australian connections too, so some local families might be interested to see how they appear in print. There is no shortage of families who have a rumoured link to the Royal family and now they have an authoritative source to check. The rest of us can just enjoy dipping into this vast lake of facts about people who might appear in the course of our research, or about whom we are simply curious. So as 2008 gets into its stride, we are blessed with some useful aids to our research. I will have to make a determined effort to use those newspapers at the British Library, for I am sure they are going to add interest, if not something actually useful, to my research. I hope you can all make progress with your research this year. |
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