The Family History Researcher Academy (that is also run be me – Nick Thorne) has just put on sale a brand new Concise Briefing crib-sheet. While the new report is a stand alone product it also compliments the in-depth online English & Welsh family history course that has beenavailable for several years from this website.
This Concise Briefing report concentrates on researching in the English and Welsh Parish Registers. It examines the Established Church records, Bishop’s Transcripts and more. Distilled into six pages of great information its aim is to help the researcher understand which resources to use and where to search for your ancestors in these English and Welsh records on and offline.
Learn about the County Record Offices and discover the websites that can help you to find your ancestors in Parish Registers – including those that are free-of-charge as well as others that make a commercial charge, or are subscription based.
This Concise Briefing also reveals:
The background to the English and Welsh Parish Registers.
Where to look for the records.
Whether you can find registers at the actual church.
What Extended registers are.
The report is reasonably priced in either US Dollars, Australian Dollars, Canadian Dollars, New Zealand Dollars or British Pounds. Read more at:
Disclosure: Please note this post contains affiliate links.*
This week TheGenealogist has expanded its growing headstone and war memorial record collections with some interesting new additions to both. The headstone records cover 53 new cemeteries and the various war memorials are from Australia, Britain, Canada and the USA.
The International Headstone collection is an ongoing project where every stone photographed or transcribed earns volunteers credits, which they can spend on subscriptions at TheGenealogist.co.uk or products from GenealogySupplies.com. If you would like to join, you can find out more about the scheme at: https://ukindexer.co.uk/headstone/
The headstone for the Earl of Avon, Anthony Eden, is included in this release. This politician served three periods as British Foreign Secretary and then succeeded Winston Churchill as Prime Minister from 1955 to 1957. He is laid to rest at Alvediston in Wiltshire.
Anthony Eden, Earl of Avon’s grave in Alvediston, Wiltshire on TheGenealogist
Anthony Eden, Earl of Avon’s grave in TheGenealogist’s headstone collection
Also published online this week are an additional 64,920War Memorial records which include a complete roll of honour for both WW1 and WW2 for Shetland, with men’s units and the Shetland village in which they had resided. There are other war memorials in this release that cover the country including the Abercarn Tinplaters Memorial Institute in Wales. There are plaques and monuments in Bedford, Bolton, Lancashire, London, Merseyside, Greater Manchester, Warwickshire and even further afield in Canada, Western Australia and the USA. One of the Canadian memorials is a fascinating, but sadly very worn, WW2 memorial from Calgary in Canada that names 227 aircrew from Australia and New Zealand who died while training in Calgary, revealing just how dangerous WW2 aviation was.
War Memorial at Battery Park, New York, USA, on TheGenealogist
From the USA TheGenealogist has uploaded some WW1 and WW2 war memorials from New York, including a fine one in Battery Park. This is a roll of those men and women who lost their lives in the Atlantic coastal waters in WW2 and had no known grave as a result of U-boat action. The war memorial gives researchers the ranks, units and the US state from which they had come, and the shockingly large number of Americans included is a salutary lesson when in Britain we are often only aware of our own countrymen/women who died at sea from enemy action against the convoys.
Lastly there are a number of Boer War memorials – for example the tribute within Blackpool Town Hall that commemorates the 74 Blackpool men who volunteered to join various units for service in South Africa.
These new records are all available as part of the Diamond Subscription at TheGenealogist.
To find out more about the UKIndexer volunteer project, you can read the following article:
*Disclosure: Please note this post contains affiliate links. This does notmean that you pay more just that I make a percentage on the sales from my links. The payments help me pay for the cost of running the site. You may like to read this explanation here:
A WWI WRNS [Public domain], via Wikimedia CommonsOn my recent visit to my father I got to talking to him about his mother, my grandmother, and her service in both of the World Wars.
What I gathered from his recollection of her was that in WWII she had been a Leading Petty Officer Wren (WRNS) stationed at Devonport while he was a teen-aged schoolboy. She was living in a flat off the Hoe until the blast from a bomb in one of the raids on Plymouth forced her to find a safer flat on the fringe of Dartmoor. Moving to an ex-nursing home within fifty yards of the Railway station at Bickleigh, with a line into Plymouth, she saw service with the Women’s Royal Naval Service throughout the conflict.
It also transpires that in the First World War, as well, she had served in the dockyard before her marriage to my grandfather in 1918. This opened up my mind to the possibility of doing some research into her time in Devenport.
With this information about her First World War service I was fascinated to find that The National Archives (TNA) have an on-demand webinar (first put online in 2015) that can help researchers understand what records survive at TNA for women who served in the First World War.
I am just back from a visit to Greenwich with my dad who is almost 93 and still fascinated by everything around him.
He had asked my sister and I to organise the trip and the two of us had a lot of fun watching him engage with the ship and its very helpful volunteer guides.
While being educated about the crew and what they would have had to do when serving on this fast sailing clipper, the knowledgeable guide explained how there was a lot of material to search on the Cutty Sark in the National Maritime Museum that is close by. This got me thinking about family history research for those of us that have had Royal Navy sailors or Merchant Navy mariners in our past families.
The National Maritime Museum is part of the Royal Museums Greenwich, that includes the Cutty Sark. There are a number of exhibitions that you can view at the complex, but the National Maritime Museum also houses the Caird Library and Archive.
If you are researching an ancestor then the good news is that this extensive maritime reference resource has free entry – you just need to register for a Reader’s Ticket. At the time of writing (April 2018) the opening hours are:
The National Maritime Museum and Archive is a fantastic and useful resource for finding out about your ancestors who went to sea. They do warn you, however, on their website that tracing people who served or travelled on ships can be a complex task and you may need to consult a range of different resources – their records can help you to search for members of the Merchant Navy and the Royal Navy as well as vessels and voyages but you may also have to back this up with records held elsewhere.
I found that there are a number of useful research guides on their website that can help you in your investigations and a number of links that will point you to useful resources that are housed elsewhere at other archives.
If you, like me, have salt in your blood then this is a facility that you should use.
Today the Royal Air Force celebrates their centenary.
To mark its birthday I was asked by TheGenealogist to write an article about one of the RAF’s key early chiefs. You can find it if you take a look at TheGenealogist’s website where they have launched some special RAF records to celebrate.
We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.OkRead more
Send to Kindle
1524214828.jpg)
![A WRNS [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](http://www.noseygenealogist.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/327px-INF3-112_Forces_Recruitment_WRNS_rating_at_railway_carriage_window_Artist_Davis-205x300.jpg)
