Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus - the National Library of Wales

  

National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth
Credit: Rhyshuw1~enwiki , CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A version of this post was originally published in 2021. Links were updated and it was last republished in 2023.

Happy St. David's Day!

If you have Welsh branches in your family tree, these online records, hosted by the National Library of Wales, are well worth exploring.

This list includes just a few of the indexed, original sources they have made freely available online.  I recommend exploring the website to see more of what they offer.

Crime & Punishment   

Tithe Maps 

Welsh Newspapers  

Welsh Journals including magazines 1735-2007 

Marriage Bonds pre-1837 

Wills proved in Welsh ecclesiastical courts before 1858 

There’s also a first-steps guide to family history research, a guide to church records in Wales,  and a list of independent researchers who carry out work for clients at the NLW.

So, with all those resources, you can start your search for your Welsh ancestors right away!

 

 

This post was originally published in 2021. Links were updated and it was last republished in 2023.

Happy St David's Day: National Library of Wales

 

National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth
Credit: Rhyshuw1~enwiki , CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

If you have Welsh branches in your family tree, these records, hosted by the National Library of Wales, are well worth exploring.

This list includes just a few of the indexed, original sources they have made freely available online.  I recommend exploring the website to see more of what they offer.

Crime & Punishment   

Tithe Maps 

Welsh Newspapers  

Welsh Journals including magazines 1735-2007 

Marriage Bonds pre-1837 

Wills proved in Welsh ecclesiastical courts before 1858 

There’s also a first-steps guide to family history research, a guide to church records in Wales,  and a list of independent researchers who carry out work for clients at the NLW.

So, with all those resources, you can start your search for your Welsh ancestors right away!

 

 

  This post was originally published in 2021. Links have been updated.     

Transcription Tuesday 2022

It’s become an annual tradition for Who Do You Think You Are? magazine to hold its crowdsourcing event, Transcription Tuesday, in February.  Everyone is invited to take part, and as usual, this year there are a few different projects involved.

For 2022, Tuesday 1st of February is the big day, but you should decide which project you’re going to work on in advance so you can familiarise yourself with the instructions. Additionally, you may need to register with the project to participate. To transcribe any record set, all you’ll need is your usual internet connection and PC or laptop.  You’ll have access to digital images of records, and these are the sources you will extract details from and type into the project software or document.  Choose the records you want to help with from

☙ FamilySearch: the world's largest genealogical record organisation is seeking help to transcribe English parish registers.  If you don't already have a free FamilySearch account, you can easily create one, and this will allow you to pick a project under the "Indexing" tab on the website.  

☙ HMS NHS: Seamen's Hospital registers.  Learn about these fascinating naval medical records, and check out the project's home page, which includes a chat function to put you in touch with other volunteers. 

☙ National Library of Wales Photo Book Collection: tagging 19th century photographs of everyday life in Wales.  More on joining this project can be found at Who Do You Think You Are?'s website. 

☙ Stories of St James's Burial Ground: the 18th century burial registers of the Parish of St James, Piccadilly.  This graveyard beside Euston Station was excavated by archaeologists in advance of an engineering project, and the burial records are held by the City of Westminster Archives.  They will need both transcription and highlighting. Find out more at the project's website. 

 

Free resources from home, via your public library

Although many libraries are starting to re-open after an extended shutdown, they may still be offering free home access to internet resources by way of compensation for the closure.  These often include subscription websites that are of interest to family historians.

All that’s needed is an online account with the relevant library.  Check your local library’s website for information about the services they are making available remotely to their members. You may need to re-register online to take full advantage of their free resources, which could include one or more of the following:

Ancestry has a Library Edition which has proved a popular choice with public libraries.  Some services, such as those in Manchester and North Lanarkshire, have also partnered with Ancestry to give readers free access to records local to their areas, such as church or poor relief registers.

FindMyPast provides a similar service through some libraries’ websites.

SCRAN is a website from Historic Environment Scotland hosting audio and visual resources from museums, galleries, archives and the media around the UK.

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography gives full access to subscribers, including those signing in with their local library’s credentials. 

For some of these websites, you can access their full content through a link on their home page that says something like “Sign in via your institution”.  Select your library’s name from the list that will appear (if you don’t see your library listed, it doesn’t provide access to that particular resource).  You will then be able to sign in with your own library account number and passcode.

A multitude of digital resources are available at home, free of charge, to all residents of Scotland, through the National Library’s website.  They include several newspaper databases such as the Times, the Scotsman, and the British Library Collections, as well as the excellent British Newspaper Archive.  Some of the sites restrict the number of NLS users that can access them at one time, but these are clearly indicated on the list of websites.  

Normally you would need to either have your own subscription or a university library account to use many of these resources, so it is well worth registering for an NLS account if you live in Scotland.  If you don’t live in Scotland, though, don’t despair; many of the Library’s online treasures are free on the open web, such as their Maps collection or the Moving Image Archive. 

Finally, if you’re disappointed with the lack of such resources through your local library, why not petition the powers that be to provide them?  You can find information online about products such as FindMyPast’s Community Edition, and pass on your suggestions to a librarian.  Alternatively, if you use and are happy with your library's digital services, give them positive feedback and encourage them to continue providing remote access after normal opening hours are resumed.  This may be especially important if library services are considering cutting back opening times in the near future.

Free Family History Mini-Class : Lesson 8

In our digital age, many otherwise inaccessible historical sources and information are readily online, not just to read, but to search using keywords and names.  You’ll find that they are often provided in formats (such as PDF files) which can be downloaded to a mobile device for use on the go.

Digital resources are an indispensable element of the genealogist’s toolkit, and even more so when access to physical archives and libraries is limited.  Check out the following links, and hopefully you’ll identify sources that you can use in your research.  All of these are free to access.

Books

HathiTrust hosts millions of digitised books from libraries the world over, while

Project Gutenberg has free e-books of many classics and out-of-copyright titles.

Newspapers

Read my previous blog posts here and here for details of some of the essential free newspaper archives online.  Don't overlook these invaluable records of your ancestors' everyday lives.

Historical city & trade directories

Scottish Post Office directories list names, addresses, and trades or occupations of people in urban areas from the 18th century onwards. 

For England & Wales, there are similar Trade & Local Directories from the 1700s to the 1910s.

Area histories

To learn more about the local history of specific counties or parishes, there are the Victoria County Histories covering England, and for Scotland, the 18th- and 19th-century editions of the Statistical Accounts. 

Digital Collections 

Such resources include many images that can bring your family’s history to life.  These are just a few suggestions.

SCRAN offers still, sound and moving images from hundreds of museums, including the Victoria & Albert and National Galleries of Scotland.  View buildings where your ancestors lived, worked, or went to school, objects they might have used, and views they would have looked out on.

The British Library's digital collections include illuminated manuscripts and vintage books with photo-illustrations, which could easily side-track you en route to their wide selection of online maps, or their oral history recordings.

Ireland

Fordham University in New York City provides an extensive list of links to free digital content from Irish libraries, archives and museums, including many sources of use to family historians.

United States

The US Library of Congress’s vast range of subject matter, from music to maps, includes local, social, and business history collections in different formats.  The America at Work, America at Leisure: Motion Pictures from 1894-1915 collection is just one highlight of a fascinating online repository.

The next class will introduce you

to some essential reference tools

for family history research.

Some of genealogy's best-kept secrets

National Library of Ireland

Now that the summer holidays are here, I have friends travelling around Britain who will doubtless be spending at least some of their time ancestor-hunting.  This has reminded me that although I’ve blogged before about using your local public library, there are four well-kept secrets around the UK and Ireland that can help you grow your family tree, also for free: our national libraries.

Here’s a short introduction to each of these great institutions.  They have countless resources which a visit to their websites can fully explain, so here are just a few stand-outs from their collections, as well as some tips that apply to all of the national libraries.  Anybody can join; you don't have to live locally.

The first of these, and probably the most well-known, is the British Library in central London.  As well as providing visitors with reference materials, they have one of the largest collections of oral histories in the world.  It’s not a well-used source of genealogical information, but before literacy was quite as widespread as it is now, families passed on details of their ancestry by word of mouth.  Recorded memories of past times and communities preserve ways of life that our ancestors would have known.

The BL is also home to the India Office collection – this includes both official records such as births, and personal papers of individuals and families with a connection to India.  This collection is a must to investigate if someone in your family worked for the East India Company, or was in military service in the subcontinent.

The National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, although its genealogical focus is on Scottish families, has an excellent online presence in their UK Map Images which anyone researching British places will find invaluable.  NLS e-resources, including newspaper collections, are freely available to Scottish residents.  And their guide to Scottish family history is well worth a look, too.  Their onsite collections include the papers of many Scottish landowning families, so if your ancestors worked for them or crofted on their lands, you may find them mentioned in correspondence or rentals.  Coincidentally, the NLS also has a collection relating to Scots with links to India. 

Located in Aberystwyth, the National Library of Wales describes itself as ‘the main repository for family history research in Wales’.  Like other libraries, some of its holdings, such as census returns, are widely available elsewhere, but the unique archives, manuscripts, newspapers, nonconformist church records, and tithe maps are not.  The archives at NLW hold many estate and family papers which will provide insight not only into the lives of the landed gentry, but to their tenants and employees as well.

The National Library of Ireland in Dublin offers fantastic on-site support for family historians.  Its free Genealogy Advisory Service provides an opportunity for you to sit down with a specialist who will give you tailored pointers on where and how to continue your research.  Useful for both beginning and experienced genealogists, this is best done at the start of your visit so that you can take advantage of the resources the library holds, including Catholic parish registers, estate papers, and maps.  No appointment is necessary for this service and its hours are posted on the NLI website.

Registration at each of the national libraries is essential and you will be issued with a reader’s pass.  Check the requirements for the library you plan to use and see if you also need to register online in advance of your visit.  Information sessions and talks are part of the work these libraries do to promote their services, and it may be useful to time your visit so that you can take advantage of one of these.  Another bonus is free in-house access to subscription websites such as FindMyPast, the British Newspaper Archive, or Ancestry.

As with any record office, you should search the library’s online catalogue before your trip to determine what they have that will help your research. Search for place and family names to discover what the library holds about the subjects you are interested in.  This is particularly crucial if the material you want to look at is stored off-site and needs to be ordered well in advance of your visit – or even just to save you a long wait while your order is retrieved from the depths of the repository.  You may want to contact library staff with any questions you have about your planned research. 

Exhibitions and displays are also part of national libraries; great for when your brain and eyes need a break from research for a bit.  And of course there are cafés and restaurants and the inevitable gift shops to enjoy.  But don’t be too tempted by the expensive wares on sale in the British Library shop!