My Top Family History Discoveries

For this week’s blog post I want to share some of my latest online genealogy discoveries.  They’re all free, searchable websites, and hopefully at least one of them will be of interest and/or use to you in your research.  Do bear in mind, though, that while they’re new to me, they may not be new to you!

So here, in no order of preference at all, they are:

Liverpool as a Trading Port  This site has collected the names of residents of the city from 1704-1860, plus ships sailing from the port between 1759 and 1809.  

Scottish Court of Session Digital Archive  Hosted by the University of Virginia Law Library, this covers the late 1750s to late 1830s. People mentioned in these documents include Scottish women, Virginia merchants, aristocratic Highland proprietors, famous authors, enslaved labourers, soldiers, American Loyalists, and many more individuals who sought justice before the Scottish Court of Session.  Many Scots were merchants and slave owners in Britain and the American colonies. 

Berlin Central Library Collections  These include telephone directories which I used recently to help with relative tracing.  The website is accessible in English (although the records are of course in German).

New Jersey Death Index  Get access to a searchable database of 1,275,833 deaths in the Garden State between 2001 and 2017, and more than half a million digitized death index images for 1901-1903, 1920-1929 and 1949-2000.  

This last one isn’t exactly new to me, but I had forgotten it was available online, and was recently reminded about it by a more on-the-ball frugal friend.  The Scottish poor law records are excellent resources for tracing people who moved about both in and out of the country.  It’s always worth putting in a few of your difficult-to-find ancestors to see what pops.

Index to Paisley Poor Law records 1839-1942  The site gives more information about what to expect from the records and how to access those you find in the index.