New Genealogy Records for Ireland & Scotland

by | Mar 16, 2019 | 01 What's New, Records & databases

This Saint Patrick’s Day we’re highlighting new and updated genealogical collections for Ireland and Scotland! You’ll see new and updated records from Ancestry and Findmypast, with particular emphasis on newspaper additions including birth, marriage, and death notices. Plus Findmypast just released their new Irish newspaper archive of transcripts that were compiled by the celebrated Irish genealogist Rosemary ffolliott. 

Featured: Irish Records

Genealogy giant subscription website Ancestry.com has a new collection of Cork, Ireland, Marriage Licence Bonds Index, 1623-1750. “The original rolls from which the printed index was created are held in the National Archives of Ireland (formerly the Public Record Office of Ireland). A Marriage Licence Bond was entered into before a Bishop, prior to the granting of the Marriage Licence, with the purpose of ensuring that the impending Marriage was legally sound. Two solvent individuals (one of which was usually the bridegroom) entered into the bond for a stated sum.”

From this collection, you might discover your ancestor’s name, their spouse’s name, and the year and place they were married. 

Additionally, Ancestry has updated their collection for the Northern Ireland newspaper, The Belfast Newsletter (Birth, Marriage and Death Notices), 1738-1925. The Belfast News-Letter began publication in 1737 as the Belfast News-Letter and General Advertiser. 

This is a fascinating database because it chronicles almost two centuries of Irish history, including the Great Famine, the country’s own political upheavals, and World War I, when the paper printed long lists of death notices after actions such as the famed Ulster Division’s attack during the Battle of the Somme. Genealogically significant items researchers may find in the News-Letter’s pages include, amongst others:

  • death or memorial notices
  • notices from or about ships or passengers that arrived safely
  • people taking out game certificates
  • notices from trade groups or guilds
  • premiums paid
  • notices of executions
  • marriages
  • births
  • lists of sheriffs
  • announcements for ships that will be leaving

Irish Newspapers Update

Findmypast just released the Irish Newspaper Transcript Archive, Ffolliott Collection 1756-1850! Search this collection of Irish newspaper transcripts that were compiled by the celebrated Irish genealogist Rosemary Ffolliott. Discover if your Irish ancestors had their birth, marriage or death announcement printed in a newspaper. Each record includes a transcript and original image.

Additionally, Findmypast’s newspaper website, The British Newspaper Archive, has a new Irish newspaper and added additional pages to the following collections:

Scottish Records

Find your Scottish ancestors in Findmypast’s recent additions and updates to their genealogical records for Scotland. 

Dundee & Forfarshire (Angus) Hearth Tax 1691 – Use this collection to find out the number of hearths in your ancestor’s home, which can provide you with clues about the family’s wealth and status. In 1690, Parliament granted a tax of 14 shillings on hearths including kilns. Heads of households, landowners, and tenants were liable for the tax, only hospitals and the poor living on charity from the parish were exempt from the tax. 

People of Banffshire 1334-1851 – Explore more than 28,000 extracts that taken from original Kirk Session minutes. Responsible for parish business, and the morals of the parishioners, the Kirk Session was the lowest level of a church court and minutes typically contained a detailed account of the parish business.

Newspaper Death Reports – Uncover details surrounding your Scottish ancestor’s death amongst more than 72,000 death notices printed in Scottish newspapers between1807 and 1990. Discover more about your relative’s life, while searching these publications you may be able to find out the date of their death and the names of their parents or spouse.

Renfrewshire, Paisley Poll Tax 1695 – Search these Poll Tax records from 1695. Each record includes a transcript of the original record, the amount of information in each record varies, you may find a combination of your ancestor’s occupation and the name of their employer, spouse or parent.

About the Author: Lacey Cooke

About the Author: Lacey Cooke

Lacey has been working with Genealogy Gems since the company’s inception in 2007. Now, as the full-time manager of Genealogy Gems, she creates the free weekly newsletter, writes blogs, coordinates live events, and collaborates on new product development. No stranger to working with dead people, Lacey holds a degree in Forensic Anthropology, and is passionate about criminal justice and investigative techniques. She is the proud dog mom of Renly the corgi. 

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links and Genealogy Gems will be compensated if you make a purchase after clicking on these links (at no additional cost to you). Thank you for supporting Genealogy Gems!

Millions of Obituaries from Around the World

by | Sep 28, 2018 | 01 What's New, Records & databases | 3 comments

Obituaries and death indexes feature prominently in recently-updated collections at Ancestry.com. These collections take us around the world: from Australia to the U.S., Canada, England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, then to Germany and The Netherlands.

Featured: Obituaries and death indexes

Genealogy giant subscription website Ancestry.com has updated 17 collections, several of which relate to obituaries and other death records. Many of these collections focus on recent deaths, which may not seem as valuable at first glance. But many obituaries contain genealogical clues back one or two or more generations, helping you link ancestors and descendants to each other in your family trees.

Furthermore, clues about a person’s death can lead you to all kinds of additional records: civil or church death records, tombstone inscriptions, cemetery and funeral records, wills and probate records, and even memorials in church or civic publications. So this is one must-have record type for every possible person on your tree for the past 100 years, or even more!

All the following collections come from Ancestry.com, where you can go to Search > Catalog to find the individual collections named below. (Just enter the collection title in part or full.)

Australia/New Zealand obituaries

“Australia and New Zealand, Obituary Index, 2004-2018,” now has more than 377,000 records. This is a fairly recent collection, but we also reported last month on updates to a sister collection of Australian newspaper vital notices dating back to the 1830s.

British Isles obituaries and deaths

An offsite collection that’s indexed on Ancestry, “Web: UK, Coal Mining Accidents and Deaths Index, 1878-1935,” now has nearly 103,000 records. According to the collection landing page, “This data is published by The Coalmining History Resource Centre. You can often find additional information by visiting the source website, including references, publication information, comments, historical context, and even images.”

The “England and Wales, Death Index, 2007-2017” at Ancestry.com now has more than 1.2 million records. The collection description says, “This collection is a compiled index that covers approximately 55% of the total deaths that occurred in this time period. This index provides death details for people in England and Wales, specifically their name, gender, date of birth or age at death, date of death, and residence place at death.”

“UK and Ireland, Obituary Index, 2004-2018” now claims more than 1.6 million records of recent deaths. “The collection contains obituaries from hundreds of newspapers. We work with partners to scour the Internet regularly to find new obituaries and extract the facts into our database. Where available we include the original URL link to the source information.”

The “Scotland and Northern Ireland, Death Index, 1989-2017” now includes over 525,000 records. It’s “a compiled index that covers approximately 45% of the total deaths that occurred in this time period. This index provides death details for people in Scotland and Northern Ireland, specifically their name, gender, date of birth or age at death, date of death, and residence place at time of death. However, they do not include the General Register Office (GRO) reference information. The index also contains a small number of records for people in Jersey and Isle of Man.”

Canada obituaries and notarial records

Ancestry’s collection of “Quebec, Canada, Notarial Records, 1637-1935” now tops 16.5 million records! According to the site, “Notarial records are private agreements (contracts), written by notaries, who are considered legal professionals. This collection consists of notarial records for Quebec from the years 1637 to 1935. Each notary set up practice and kept sets of records for documents they created.”

Looking for Canadian obituaries? The “Canada, Obituary Collection, 1898-2018” now has more than 1.4 million entries. Its historical depth—more than 100 years—and its inclusion of recent deaths set it apart from some other obituary indexes reported here.

Germany vital records

The collection “Mainz, Germany, Births, Marriages and Deaths, 1798-1875” now has nearly 900,000 records. The site offers excellent background for this database: “The current capital of the Rhine-Palatinate state in Germany, Mainz has a rich and storied history….Since the late 18th century, Mainz has been at times under French, Prussian, and German rule, and for a brief spell, it was a democratic free state.

“Initially, registrations of births, marriages, and deaths were kept by religious denominations, but with French occupation in the 1790s, a system of civil registration modeled on the French system was implemented in 1798. This collection includes civil registrations of births, marriages, and deaths beginning in 1798 and extending to 1875. In 1876, civil registration was implemented across unified Germany, and some of those records can be found in other Ancestry collections.”

Netherlands military Scandinavian genealogy obituaries

“Exercise Field Artillery Corps” album, image AKL092038, Netherlands Institute of Military History uploads at Flickr Creative Commons, https://www.flickr.com/photos/nimhimages/16026248719/.

The Netherlands: Obituaries and more

The Ancestry.com collection “Netherlands, Newspaper Announcements Index, 1795-1945” now has over 5 million records. “This collection consists of an index to announcements and advertisements from various newspapers. Approximately forty percent of the records are death (Overlijden) announcements. Just under one-quarter of the records are birth (Geboorte) announcements, and nearly as many are miscellaneous (Diversen) announcements or advertisements. The remaining records consist of marriage (Huwelijk) announcements. Details vary depending on the event….Also included is the name of the archive where the original record can be found, as well as a link to the record on the source website. In most cases, additional information about the original record will be available via that link. In some cases, images of the original records may be available via that link as well.”

United States obituary and death records

Two enormous collections of U.S. obituary and other death records have been updated at Ancestry.com. “U.S., Cemetery and Funeral Home Collection, 1847-2018” has passed 9 million records. The site describes the collection as one harvested from cemetery and funeral home records all over the Internet (to which individual entries link, wherever possible). A related collection, “U.S., Obituary Collection, 1930-2018,” now has nearly 40 million records, and is also described as a compilation of records gleaned from many resources online.

Got Oregon Trail ancestors? The “Willamette Valley, Oregon, Death Records, 1838-2006” collection now has more than 158,000 records. It “contains a collection of various death records for Willamette Valley, Oregon. Most are from Marion County. They include funeral home records, cemetery records, newspaper obituaries, and death certificates transcribed or compiled by members of the Willamette Valley Genealogical Society.”

Now topping 5 million records, the “New York, Death Index, 1852-1956” collection “consists of indices of deaths from the state of New York. Details vary, but may include the following information for the deceased: name, death date, death city, age at death, gender [and] certificate number.”

More to learn about obituaries

Not motivated enough yet to pursue obituaries for your relatives? Read our free article, 12 things you can learn in obituaries, and you’ll probably change your mind! An obituary isn’t just a record of a death: it’s often a window into a lifetime.
About the Author: Sunny Morton

About the Author: Sunny Morton

Sunny is a Contributing Editor at Lisa Louise Cooke’s Genealogy Gems; her voice is often heard on the Genealogy Gems Podcast and Premium Podcasts. She’s  known for her expertise on the world’s biggest family history websites (she’s the author of Genealogy Giants: Comparing the 4 Major Websites); writing personal and family histories (she also wrote Story of My Life: A Workbook for Preserving Your Legacy); and sharing her favorite reads for the Genealogy Gems Book Club.

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links and Genealogy Gems will be compensated if you make a purchase after clicking on these links (at no additional cost to you). Thank you for supporting Genealogy Gems!

New Genealogy Records Include UK Suffragettes and Travelers’ Records

by | Feb 16, 2018 | 01 What's New, British, Immigration, Irish, Scottish Genealogy

New collections about Great Britain Suffragettes and travelers on the S.S. Great Britain headline this week’s roundup of new genealogy records online. Read here about more new genealogy records for England, Scotland and Ireland: parish records, newspapers and more.

Great Britain Suffragettes Collection free until March 8

In honor of the 100th anniversary of the first phase of women’s suffrage in England, genealogy giant Findmypast.com (together with The National Archives) has launched The Suffragette Collection. This new online collection of government records, digitized from originals at Kew, “reveals the struggles endured by the movement’s most ardent supporters and highlights the State’s response as it attempted to contain them,” says a company press release.

“Researchers can expect to find photographs, cabinet office papers, calendars of prisoners and Home Office papers on suffragette disturbances and prosecutions,” says Findmypast. “The collection also includes an index of women arrested between 1906 and 1914, the official police watch list recording the details of over 1,300 militant suffragettes, reports of prison conditions, force-feeding, police surveillance and much more….The collection brings together the stories of women from all classes who actively supported women’s suffrage, either by attending demonstrations and meetings or opting for militant ‘direct action.’”

Within days of its launch, the collection also added 271 issues of The Suffragette (later The Britannia, 1912-1918). “Edited by Christabel Pankhurst, it was the official organ of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU),” says Findmypast. It reported on “efforts made by the WSPU towards achieving women’s suffrage and detailing their support for the Allies during the Great War.”

S.S. Great Britain travelers and crew

You can now explore a free website with a searchable database of everyone who ever traveled on the S.S. Great Britain, both passengers and crew. Virtual exhibits on the Global Stories website also allow visitors to explore everyday life aboard the ship; what happened when people died, took ill, were hurt, or gave birth; what kinds of entertainment or discipline passengers could expect and more. You can even search departures and arrivals as the ship circumnavigated the globe 32 times and stopped at five continents between 1845 and 1970.

The Newark Advertiser Photo Archive

Thousands of images from The Newark Advertiser (UK) are now searchable online, thanks to volunteers who have been steadily digitizing and uploading images to the free Images from the Past gallery. According to a recent article in The Newark Advertiser, helpers “are working their way through thousands of old photographic negatives, some dating back to the 1940s. Because of their age, some of the negatives are becoming damaged or corroded so it is vital that they are digitized. They are also in a variety of formats, with the earliest on glass. The volunteers have worked through from the 1940s and are now nearing the 1970s.”

Newspapers

The British Newspaper Archive has recently added hundreds of thousands of digitized newspaper pages to current and newly-published titles. Here are some highlights:

  • North Star and Farmer’s Chronicle, 1895-1903 and 1905-1911 (NEW title)
  • Clifton Society, 1891-1892, 1894-1897, 1899-1916 (nearly 20,000 pages added) (NEW title)
  • Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday, 1885-1896 (NEW title)
  • Pearson’s Weekly, 1891-1911 (over 25,000 pages added) (NEW title)
  • Birmingham Daily Post, 1973, 1979 (nearly 15,000 pages added)
  • Neots Chronicle and Advertiser, 1855-1873, 1875-1886
  • Shipping and Mercantile Gazette, 1880-1881
  • Birmingham Daily Gazette, 1926, 1931
  • Lloyd’s List, 1889, 1894, 1896-1897, 1904, 1906-1909 (nearly 40,000 pages added!)
  • Northampton Chronicle and Echo, 1880-1882, 1884-1885, 1891, 1893-1894, 1896, 1899-1908, 1910, 1913-1915, 1918 (nearly 25,000 pages added)
  • Bristol Daily Post, 1860-1864, 1867-1873, 1875 (nearly 14,000 pages added) (NEW title)
  • Clifton and Redland Free Press, 1890-1895, 1898-1910, 1913-1931 (NEW title)
  • West Middlesex Herald, 1855-1858, 1860-1861, 1863-1870, 1890-1895 (NEW title)
  • Reading Observer, 1897-1898, 1900-1909, 1911-1914, 1921-1924 (over 12,000 pages added)
  • Kinross-shire Advertiser, 1850-1852, 1879-1884, 1890, 1892, 1900-1918
  • Leicester Herald, 1827-1842 (NEW title)
  • The Suffragette, 1912-1918 (NEW title)
  • Coventry Evening Telegraph, 1972-1979 (over 140,000 pages added!)
  • West Sussex County Times, 1874, 1877-1889, 1891-1892
  • Bristol Magpie, 1891, 1903, 1906-1907, 1911
  • Horfield and Bishopston Record and Montepelier & District Free Press, 1899-1911, 1913-1931
  • Middlesex & Surrey Express, 1887-1888, 1890-1895, 1899-1909 (over 11,000 pages added)
  • Croydon Chronicle and East Surrey Advertiser, 1870, 1875-1888, 1890-1892, 1894-1896, 1898-1908, 1911 (more than 14,000 pages added)
  • The Clifton & Redland Free Press, 1891-1931

England parish and probate records

The free genealogy giant, FamilySearch.org, has recently added significantly to its collections of England parish records:

The subscription-access genealogy giant Ancestry.com recently published the following collections:

Findmypast.com has updated its collection of Devon parish records, with over 30,000 new records in Baptisms, nearly 40,000 new records in Banns and nearly 80,000 new records in Marriages, about 31,000 new records in Burials, and all of these records (and more) browsable in its image collection of Devon, Plymouth & West Devon Parish Registers.

More new genealogy records from the British Isles

Ireland. Ancestry.com has published a new collection, Clare, Ireland, Church of Ireland Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1744-1991, with nearly 14,000 indexed records. According to the collection description, “This collection includes baptism, marriage, and burial records from parishes in the County of Clare in Ireland, with dates ranging from 1744 to 1991.”

Scotland. Ancestry.com has published three new collections for Scotland. They are small, but if they mention your ancestors, they’re important!

Start tracing your British Isles genealogy

The British Empire once spanned the globe and had a presence on every continent. Chances are that at some point you will need to extend your research back to the British Isles. Genealogical research in the British Isles has some unique characteristics. Guest blogger Kate Eakman, a Senior Researcher for Legacy Tree Genealogists, clarifies confusing terms and helps you get your research started on solid footing. Click here to read her tips.
About the Author: Sunny Morton

About the Author: Sunny Morton

Sunny is a Contributing Editor at Lisa Louise Cooke’s Genealogy Gems; her voice is often heard on the Genealogy Gems Podcast and Premium Podcasts. She’s  known for her expertise on the world’s biggest family history websites (she’s the author of Genealogy Giants: Comparing the 4 Major Websites); writing personal and family histories (she also wrote Story of My Life: A Workbook for Preserving Your Legacy); and sharing her favorite reads for the Genealogy Gems Book Club.

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links and Genealogy Gems will be compensated if you make a purchase after clicking on these links (at no additional cost to you). Thank you for supporting Genealogy Gems!

New Records at the Genealogy Giants Websites

by | Nov 17, 2017 | 01 What's New, Genealogy Giants Websites, Records & databases

Enjoy millions of new records from the ‘Genealogy Giants’ websites this week: Ancestry, FamilySearch, Findmypast, and MyHeritage! New collections are now available for England, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Denmark. Also new are two collections of WWII Holocaust records. 

Genealogy Giants new records

England Records at Findmypast & Ancestry

A massive amount of new records at the ‘Genealogy Giants’ websites were published this week. First up are millions of new English records collections. We’ll start with Findmypast’s new databases:

Surrey, England

  • Lay Subsidies 1524-1645: early taxation records from the Tudor and Jacobean periods.
  • Court Cases 1391-1835: The records contain cases from four courts and will give you the necessary references for accessing the original records in The National Archives.
  • Wills & Probate Index, 1470-1856: The area covered includes the old county of Surrey in the southeast of England, which contains parts of South London.

British Army Records

Next, we head to Ancestry for even more new English record collections.

Lastly, FamilySearch has a new collection of Essex Parish Registers, 1538-1997. This collection contains christening, marriage, and burial entries.

Ireland – Findmypast

New at Findmypast for Ireland are British Army, Irish Regimental Enlistment Registers 1877-1924. This collection has enlistment registers from five Irish regiments serving in the British Army. The regiments included in these records are Connaught Rangers, Leinster Regiment, Royal Dunlin Fusiliers, Royal Irish Regiment, and Royal Munster Fusiliers.

A new Irish newspaper title has also been added at Findmypast: the Carrickfergus Advertiser 1884 – 1919. The collection currently contains over 1,300 issues and will be updated further in the future.

Netherlands Public Records at FamilySearch

New at FamilySearch: Netherlands Archival Indexes, Public Records. This collection contains nearly 3 million records that cover events like population registration, emigration and immigration, military enrollment and more.

Denmark – 1930 Census Free at FamilySearch

The Denmark Census, 1930 is now available for free at FamilySearch! “Commonly indexed fields include principle name, locality data, gender, marital status, and relationship to head of household.” The images and index were provided in partnership with MyHeritage.

World War II Holocaust Records and MyHeritage and Ancestry

New at MyHeritage are Auschwitz Death Certificates, 1941-1943. Information listed includes name, birth date, death date, birthplace, residence, and religion. The information originates from the Auschwitz Sterbebücher (Death Books).

Ancestry also has a new collection of Romania select Holocaust Records 1940-1945 (USHMM). This collection is primarily in Romanian, but may also be in Hungarian. It was indexed by World Memory Project contributors from the digitized holdings of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Get the most out of the top genealogy records websites

genealogy giants quick reference guide cheat sheet“Which genealogy records membership website should I use?” It’s one of the most-asked questions in genealogy. There are so many features on each site–and an apples-to-apples comparison is laden with challenges. But Genealogy Gems Contributing Editor Sunny Morton has the answers for you in the jammed-packed Genealogy Giants cheat sheet. Use it to quickly and easily compare all of the most important features of the four biggest international genealogy records membership websites: Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org, Findmypast.com, and MyHeritage.com. Then consult it every time your research budget, needs or goals change. Tables, bulleted lists, and graphics make this guide as easy to use as it is informative. Click here to learn more and grab your copy.

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links and Genealogy Gems will be compensated if you make a purchase after clicking on these links (at no additional cost to you). Thank you for supporting the free Genealogy Gems podcast and blog!

New England Vital Records and More: New Genealogy Records Online

by | May 5, 2017 | 01 What's New, African-American, British, Church, Digital Archives, FamilySearch, Findmypast, Irish, Italian, Military, Newspaper, Records & databases, United States

Millions of New England vital records are among newly-published genealogy records online. So are English parish records, Irish Easter Rising records, Italian civil registrations, South African church records, and records for Georgia WWI soldiers and Louisiana women.

New online this week are millions of new genealogy records from around the world! First, we’ll feature these (mostly) free vital records collections for New England states–but keep scrolling. We’ve got records to mention for other parts of the U.S., as well as England, Ireland, Italy, and South Africa.

New England Vital Records

New England vital records online got a BIG bump this week with the following additions:

Sample image from “Maine Vital Records, 1670-1921.” Database with images. FamilySearch. http://FamilySearch.org : 2 May 2017. Citing Division of Vital Statistics. State Board of Health, Augusta. Click to view.

Connecticut. More than 755,000 indexed names have been added to FamilySearch.org’s free collection, Connecticut Marriages, 1640-1939. This hybrid index/image collection has this note: “We have legal rights to publish most of the images associated with these records; however, there are a few records that will not have an accompanying image available for view.”

Maine. FamilySearch.org has added nearly a half million indexed names to its collection of Maine Vital Records, 1670-1921. According to the site, the collection is comprised of a “name index and images of birth, marriage, and death returns acquired from the State Board of Health, Division of Vital Statistics and the state archives.”

Massachusetts: New images have been added to the New England Historic Genealogical Society’s collection for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, 1789-1900. The update includes the following volumes: Immaculate Conception (Salem), St. Mary (Salem), and Sacred Heart (Roslindale).

Rhode Island. FamilySearch has added over a half million new indexed names and 30,000 digital images to its free collection, Rhode Island – Vital records. These are described as “Certificates and registers of births, 1846-1898, 1901-1903, marriages 1901-1903 and deaths, 1901-1953 acquired from the State Archives in Providence.”

Other new and updated records in the US include:

  • Newspapers – Baltimore MD and Hartford CT. Newspapers.com has added issues for two major papers: the Baltimore Sun (1837-2017) and the Hartford Courant (1764–2017). (With a Newspapers.com Basic subscription, you can access issues of these papers through 1922; or, with a Publisher Extra subscription, access those early years and additional issues from 1923 onward.)
  • Georgia. A memorial book for Georgia soldiers who served in World War I is being updated to include the names of African-Americans who served. “Due to the social and racial conditions of the time, this Memorial Book contains the information for only white soldiers,” explains the database landing page on the free United States World War I Centennial Commission website. “The current project is rectifying this by adding information for Georgia’s African-American personnel that also died in service. Further, we are adding names found on WWI monuments and plaques that are missing from the original Memorial Book….As missing names are determined and documented, they will be added” We learned about it in this press release from the University of North Georgia.
  • Louisiana. A collection of digitized publications by the Louisiana United Methodist Women (and predecessor organizations) is now free to search at the Centenary College of Louisiana Archives & Special Collections web portal (scroll down to Digital Collections and click Louisiana United Methodist Women’s Publications). According to an announcement by the college, “The digitized material includes annual reports (1884-2014) and newsletters (1963-2006) – 12,000 pages in total. Researchers can access them online, page through each volume, download complete PDFs, and search the full text versions.” Published digitized material is easy to keyword-search for ancestors’ names and hometowns. Here’s a general tip for finding married women’s names in older documents: search on just her surname or her husband’s name, as she may appear as “Mrs. Alexander Reed.”

England: Newspapers and Parish Records 

The British Newspaper Archive has added two new titles, The Yarmouth Independent (a Norfolk paper, 1862-1891) and The Rugby Advertiser (a Warwickshire title, 1850s-1950s).

Subscription website TheGenealogist has published over 100,000 parish records and thousands of voter records. According to the announcement, polls books include “35 different registers of people who were entitled to vote in Wakefield, West Yorkshire and other constituencies situated in Hampshire, Gloucestershire, Somerset and New Westminster in Canada….Electoral records are taken from the official lists produced to record who was entitled to vote in the various parliamentary elections.” Among new parish record collections are “100,000 new individuals added for the County of Worcestershire and additionally the Registers of the Parish Church of Rochdale in Lancashire that covers the period between 1642 and 1700.”

Findmypast.com has added 312,000 new records to its collection of Kent marriage records. New additions are for the parishes of Bapchild, Biddenden, Kilndown, Tenterden, and Wittersham. Additionally, over 18,000 new records have been added to Kent Baptisms (parishes of Bapchild, Brompton, Chatham, New Gillingham, Wingham and Wittersham); over 3,000 records have been added to Kent Banns (parishes of Bapchild, Biddenden, and Wittersham); and over 18,000 new records are in Kent Burials (parishes of Bapchild, Kilndown, Tenterden, and Wittersham).

The site has also added to its records for North West Kent, described as “areas within the London boroughs which were historically part of Kent.” Over 23,000 records have been added to the North West Kent Baptisms collection, and another 15,000 to North West Kent Burials.

Ireland – Easter Rising and Newspapers

Findmypast.com has added over 76,000 records to its collection, Easter Rising & Ireland Under Martial Law 1916-1921. According to the site, “These once classified records, digitized from original documents held by The National Archives in Kew, record the struggles of life under martial law in Ireland and contain the details of soldiers and civilians who participated in or were affected by the Easter Rising of April 1916.”

“Your ancestor may be found in the records if they were killed or wounded during the conflict, arrested and held in internment, or tried by court martial. Additionally, if their home or place of work was searched they may appear in the records as the collection shows the efforts of the military and police to discover arms, ammunition and seditious material through thousands of raids.”

Also, Findmypast.com has added over 401,089 new articles and one new title to its collection of historic Irish Newspapers. The Ballymena Weekly Telegraph is the latest publication to join the collection and currently covers the years 1904, 1906-1916, 1921-1929 and 1931-1957.

Italian genealogy Italy flagItaly – Civil Registration

FamilySearch.org has added to its free online collections of Italy’s civil registration records. Among them are:

  • Trapani, 1906-1928; 1.1 million images added to an existing collection
  • Brescia, 1797-1815, 1866-1943; 620,801 new browseable image
  • Napoli, 1809-1865; 164,991 images added to an existing collection
  • Benevento, 1810-1942, over a million images added to an existing collection

South Africa – Church records and civil death records

FamilySearch.org has added more than 61,000 digital record images and over 3,000 indexed names to its collection, South Africa, Dutch Reformed Church Records (Stellenbosch Archive), 1690-2011. Also updated at FamilySearch.org is South Africa, Cape Province, Civil Deaths, 1895-1972, with over 16,000 new names.

Keep up with genealogy news from around the world with Lisa Louise Cooke’s FREE Genealogy Gems weekly e-newsletter. You’ll get a free Google Research e-book as a thank-you gift when you do. From this page (or any other on this website), just enter your name where it says “Sign up for the free email newsletter” and click GO.

 

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