Archives Throwing Open Their Records!

The UK’s National Archives (TNA) at Kew are offering free downloads of their digital records at the moment.  There is usually a charge of at least a few pounds for these and they include wills and military records.  It’s well worth exploring what else is available, and this guide to their family history resources will help you decide if they have records that will help your research, and if they're in digital download format.

One of their guides is for the 1939 England & Wales Register, showing how to search it and decipher its different codes and annotations.  It’s available on Ancestry and FindMyPast, and these two subscription sites regularly offer free access to some of their datasets.

Try searching TNA's Discovery catalogue using your ancestor’s name.  This covers what is held at Kew as well as many records kept in other archives throughout Britain.  Although there are millions of documents, a significant number have been catalogued using personal names they contain.  

I tried a quick search for one individual last week and found his will, as well as paternity records in another English archive - which the archivist kindly checked for me after an e-mail asking for their advice.  That solved a major question about this family, and even inspired me to take it a step further and discover, after many years’ searching, proof of a second and potentially illegal marriage.

It proved to me that there are always more records out there waiting to be uncovered, and that re-searching a source you've already looked into without success can produce results beyond your wildest imagination!  

☙ Many other online record and historical sources are being made freely available while archive buildings are closed to the public, and I'll be blogging about those in a future post. ☙