UK and Ireland

• UK & Ireland - Archives and Libraries - links and information.

• UK & Ireland - Bibliography - links and information.

• Dictionary of National Biography Index and Epitome, ed. Sir Sidney Lee (1903), based on the 63-volume work. It's part of the Bolles London Collection in the Perseus Project, Tufts University in Massachusetts. This volume, with 30,378 biographical entries on English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish notables up to the late 19th century, grew into today's three-volume Concise DNB, and the entire DNB is now being revised by Oxford University Press. (Users with a UK public library card can access the current DNB at http://www.oxforddnb.com/.)
• The BBC's Memoryshare website (archived copy) is "a living archive of memories from 1900 to the present day [to which readers] can contribute, share and browse memories of life experiences and see them in the context of recent and historical events.".
• The Methodist Archives - Index of Methodist ministers.
• Searchable Index to Who Was Who 1897-1916,  provided by UK Genealogy Archives.

• TNA provide:
  • A very useful  Research Guide: Companies and business
  • Their National Register of Archives (NRA) ("Discovery") is particularly useful for finding the location of the archived records of named organisations
• The Association of Business Historians creates and disseminates knowledge about business history.
• TNA hold some railway company records. (Ancestry provides subscription access to the TNA's railway employment records 1833-1958, from a number of historic railway companies.)
• Some employers' and trade association archives are held by Warwick University's Modern Record Centre.
• Trade directories can provide some information (including advertisements) about businesses, large and small, through the years.
• Railway Work, Life and Death - records of railway worker accidents in Britain between 1911 and 1915 - "a joint initiative between the University of Portsmouth and the National Railway Museum (NRM)".
• The John Lewis Memory Store: ". . . a living history of John Lewis & Partners. Through the site, people share their memories, photos, maps and information about John Lewis & Partners, past and present."
• United Kingdom Cemetery Records, from Interment.net.

• The National Burial Index is hosted by findmypast (subscription site).
• List of Registered Cemeteries from Historic England.
• Gravestone photograph resource: an "index of the names that appear on photos taken by the Gravestone Photographic Resource Project team". This valuable project provides email copies of any of its collection of grave monument images free of charge on request.
• The Deceased Online website -"the first central database of statutory burial and cremation registers for the UK and Republic of Ireland" (subscription site).
• The Church Monuments Society provides photographs of the more interesting monuments (NOT monumental inscriptions) in a limited number of church yards.
• Index for Burials at Sea - from Ancestry and FindaGrave.

• UK & Ireland - Census - links and information.

• Brian Pears has provided a list of the dates of Easter Sunday for the years 1550-2049 with a calendar for each year.
• Mike Spathaky provides a very informative paper: Old and New Style Dates and the Change to the Gregorian Calendar.
• For conversions between the Gregorian and Julian (and other) calendars see the Calendar Converter page.
• Chamber's Book of Days - "a miscellany of popular antiquities in connection with the calendar".
• Bob Sanders has provided Chronologies of British History:-
  • Up to 1500 AD
  • 1500 to 1899 (archived copy)
  • 1900 to date
• The Albion College (Michigan) website has several pages relating to the English Calendar including a useful Regnal Year Calculator.
• An On-line Calendar of Saints Days produced by Glenn Gunhouse.
• TimeSearch - "Search the Web through Time".
• Our Time Lines - enables the placement of ancestors within historical events during their lifetimes.
• Weekday Calculator - What Day is this date?

Sites to help you find current churches.

• Methodist
• Quakers

• UK & Ireland - Church History - links and information.

• UK & Ireland - Church Records - links and information.

• Information on Civil Registration in the countries of the British Isles
• Research your family history using the General Register Office - includes details of the GRO's certificate ordering service.
• The UK BMD web site offers links to over 400 web sites that provide on-line information for UK births, marriages and deaths.

• The Complete Newgate Calendar is now online.
• Old Bailey Online - the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, London's Central Criminal Court, 1674 to 1913: "A fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London's central criminal court."
• Derek Wilcox's Black Sheep Index - "an index of Victims and Villains (and some heroes too) extracted from newspaper reports of court cases and inquests between 1865-1900" (archived copy).
• Capital punishment in the 18th & 19th centuries - many listings and articles.
• About Prison History - from the Open University's  International Centre for the History of Crime, Policing and Justice.
• The Digital Panopticon - "allows you to search millions of records from around fifty datasets, relating to the lives of 90,000 convicts from the Old Bailey".

• The TNA has numerous Research Guides pertaining to Courts of Law.
• Many coroners' inquests were subsequently reported in local newspapers  
• The Court of Chivalry 1634-1640 - "The aim of the site is to make available to scholars, researchers, local historians and genealogists the records of the Court of Chivalry during its heyday between 1634 and 1640. Over this period the court dealt with well over a thousand cases of which it has been possible to recover details of 738. These cover a wide variety of topics relating to the social, political and cultural history of the period, from ship money and the Bishops' Wars to pew disputes and duelling, from heralds visitations and grants of arms to brawls in the street and quarrels at race meetings."
• An Introduction to Quarter Sessions Records (archived copy), by Richard Ratcliffe.

• Descriptions of the county and its towns and parishes from different periods can be found in trade directories from the early 19th century onwards - see Directories.
• Travel Writing - transcriptions of a number of books describing early travels in Britain, from Vision of Britain.
• The U.K. Database of Historic Parks and Gardens provided by Landscapes & Gardens at the University of York.
• The complete texts of Defoe's Tour of Great Britain (1778), Thompson's Tour of England and Scotland (1785) and Stebbing's Tour of the west of England. Made available by The Center for Retrospective Digitization, Göttingen State and University Library.
• Geograph British Isles - "aims to collect a geographically representative photograph for every square kilometre of the British Isles".
• Historical Aerial Photography - "an unsurpassed collection of information about old aerial photographs of the UK, from the 40's to the 90's..."
• Britain From Above - "the unique Aerofilms collection of aerial photographs from 1919-1953".
• Round the Coast scanned photographs from "An album of pictures from photographs of the chief seaside places of interest in Great Britain and Ireland" (George Newnes Ltd., 1895)" provided by by Rosemary and Stan Rodliffe.
• A modern map of the United Kingdom.

• UK & Ireland - Directories - links and information.

• The DiCamillo Companion to British and Irish County Houses - information on present and demolished country houses throughout UK and Ireland, including history, information about owners, etc.
• Lost Heritage  lists significant English country houses which have been demolished, severely reduced in size, or are ruin, including many in Berkshire, some with pictures.
• British Listed Buildings Online is an online database of buildings and structures of architectural and historic interest with data for each building, some photographs, location on a map, Google Streetview and Bing Birds Eye View.   
• The Land Registry offer historical reports of past ownership.
• Valuation Office survey 1910 - 1915. - see Taxation.  
• For Public Houses (pubs) - see Occupations (under Inns, Hotels and Pubs). 

Barratt, Nick. Tracing the History of Your House, PRO Publications (2006), 272pp.  [ISBN-13: 978-1903365908].

• UK & Ireland - Emigration and Immigration - links and information.

• UK & Ireland - Gazetteers - links and information.

• UK & Ireland - Genealogy - links and information.

• UK & Ireland - Handwriting - links and information.

• The College of Arms website. "The College of Arms is the official repository of the coats of arms and pedigrees of English, Welsh, Northern Irish and Commonwealth families and their descendants. Its records also include official copies of the records of Ulster King of Arms the originals of which remain in Dublin." The College publishes a quarterly online newsletter.
• Additional information is provided by the Society of Genealogists' Information Leaflet: "The right to Arms" (SoG members only).
• The College of Arms, London, by Colin Meays.
• The College of Arms Foundation, Inc. - "The Foundation ... promotes knowledge of, and interest in, English heraldry in the United States."
• The White Lion Society - A Society of Friends of Her Majesty's College of Arms.
• Heraldica, Franois Velde's Heraldry Site, has some very interesting material on British Heraldry.
• "Pssst! Want to Buy Your Family's Coat of Arms?" (archived copy) by Dick Eastman exposes the tricksters who operate in shopping malls and on the internet.
• Heraldry - from the Notes on Medieval English Genealogy website.
• A Glossary of Terms Used in Heraldry - transcription of the book by James Parker (1894).
• Pimbley's Dictionary of Heraldry - archived copy from Google.
• How to Read a Coat of Arms (archived copy)- from the Cheshire Heraldry website.
• The Heraldry Society website.
• Regulation of Heraldry in England, from Heraldica.

• The Great Britain Historical Geography Information Service (GBHGIS) provides a mass of information about Britain's localities as they have changed over time. Information comes from census reports, historical gazetteers, travellers' tales and historic maps.
• A Vision of Britain Through Time, in the GBHGIS, provides maps and statistical information derived from census reports covering the period 1801-2001, searchable by place name or post code.
• The Association of British Counties (A.B.C.) "is a society dedicated to promoting awareness of the continuing existence of the 86 traditional Counties of Britain".
• British Counties, Parishes, etc. for Genealogists (archived copy).

• UK & Ireland - History - links and information.

• The Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain.
• Jewish Communities and Records contains details of more than 1,200 congregations, past and present.
• The Jewish Museum, London
• The Jewish Chronicle is a useful source of information to track Jewish people and events back to 1841.
• JewishGen has an number of online databases. 
• Eugene Harfield. A Commercial Directory of the Jews of the United Kingdom. London: Hewlett & Pierce (1894) 280pp.

• For English and Welsh records see PRO Leaflet: Tithe Records in the National Archives. Scottish records are held at the National Archives of Scotland in Edinburgh.
• The University of Nottingham provides a detailed set of explanatory pages: Introduction to Deeds.
• Legal Terms in Land Records is a useful glossary of obscure terms which occur in property deeds.
• Robin Alston's Country House Database (archived copy) "represents a first attempt at listing country houses in the British Isles from the late medieval period to ca. 1850, together with an index to all the families so far traced as having occupied them".
• Estate Records held by Kings College, Cambridge.
• Disused Railway Stations website - a large and growing set of photographs of closed stations, with brief details of each station and a map showing its location.
• The Trace My House website provides extensive information and guidance for anyone wishing to investigate the history of a house and the people who lived in it.
• TNA's Research Guide on Houses - "Records relating to the history of houses are kept in a variety of archives. This guide will help you to find out where the information you are looking for might be, and how to go about finding it."
• British Listed Buildings - "an online database of buildings and structures that are listed as being of special architectural and historic interest".
• Researching Historic Buildings in the British Isles - a guide.

• Alison U. Ring has provided some valuable and very readable notes on Latin in Parish Registers.
• Learn Medieval Latin - from The National Archives.
• Dave Wilton's  Word Origins (archived copy) is a blog "devoted to etymology, the study of word and phrase origins", while the Wikipedia History of the English Language page provides links to more detailed resources.
• Deciphering Old Handwriting - from a course taught by Sabina J. Murray (archived copy).
• How To Read A 200-Year-Old Document and Other FAQs (archived copy) from Archiving Early America provides some useful tips about the "long s" and other common problems.
• Green's Online Dictionary of Slang - "Five hundred years of the vulgar tongue".
• Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources - the British Academy  research project at the University of Oxford..

• UK & Ireland - Maps - links and information.

• UK & Ireland - Medical Records - links and information.

• UK & Ireland - Merchant Marine - links and information.

• UK & Ireland - Military History - links and information.

• UK & Ireland - Military Records - links and information.

• Finding Modern Locations. How to find a present day house, street or place in the U.K. (or to find only the Post Code).
• UK Placename Finder - "information on the names of more than 160,000 UK places".
• Gazetteer of British Place Names - from the Association of British Counties.
• What's in a Named Place? The meanings of prefixes and suffixes in Britain's place names. (From the Countrylovers' Website archived copy.)
• One-place studies are a branch of family history and/or local history with a focus on the entire population of a place.  There are two listings:  Society for One-Place Studies and Register of One-Place Studies.

• UK & Ireland - Names, Personal - links and information.

• UK & Ireland - Newspapers - links and information.

• Darryl Lundy provides a large searchable collection of information on European Royal families and the British Peerage.
• Debrett's Essential Guide to the Peerage.
• The Georgian Papers Online project is a fascinating insight into the Royal Household in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and provides access to descriptions and digital images of letters, diaries, account books and household records and receipts. And via Findmypast you can search more than 386,000 employment records, which include staff at royal residences across the UK between 1526 and 1924. The database is drawn from a number of different types of document, but records usually include dates of employment, salary and career history.

• UK & Ireland - Occupations - links and information.

• UK & Ireland - Periodicals - links and information.

• Links to Local Government Websites (archived copy, July 2022) provided by UK250.
• List of Open Central Government Websites provided by the Cabinet Office.
• Government Publications
• The Developing Franchise - British Isles (archived copy), by Timothy Owston.
• Transcripts of Various Acts of Parliament of Interest to the Genealogist - a large collection, provided by Guy Etchells.
• The Official Home of Revised UK Legislation: The National Archives provide free online full text searchable access to all UK legislation from as early as 1267 for the UK and 1953 for that from the EU, for anyone who is interested in historical UK legislations for their research.

• Peter Higginbotham's comprehensive The Workhouse website provides a wealth of information about Workhouses, the Poor Law and related issues.catalogue
• If you are looking for someone who was in a workhouse, it is worth checking if they also appear in the Quarter Sessions records, held in County Record Offices - see the British Library's Discovery catalogue (use Advanced Search and select "Search Other Archives"). 
• You can search and freely download documents of a number of Poor Law Unions across England and Wales from TNA.
• Settlement Examinations in England and Wales - a detailed explanation, from LDS Familysearch, based on an article by Anthony Camp.

• Statistics on the population of the British Isles (archived copy).
• Histpop, the online historical population reports website, in its census section provides access to all the published population reports for Britain and Ireland from 1801 - 1937. The site has a huge amount of statistical information both at a county level and at a parish or district level. There is no personal information on the site.
• Comparative Account of the Population of Great Britain in the years 1801, 1811, 1821, and 1831. House of Commons (19 October 1831) 432pp. (Provides parish-level population counts, for England, Wales and Scotland.)

Information on the Mulready envelope which was used just before the introduction of the famous "Penny Black" postage stamp. (Provided by Mulready's Family Restaurant).

• Post-1858 wills: copies can be ordered from the Probate Service or from UKDocuments for a  fee.
• Pre-1858 Wills: administrations and other probate records will be found in the Record Office holding the documents of the ecclesiastical (church) court where the will was proved.
• For English and Welsh records see TNA Leaflet: Will and Probate Records. Scottish testamentary records are held at the National Archives of Scotland in Edinburgh.
• Copies of wills proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury can be obtained for a fee from the National Archives via their Wills 1384-1858 page.
• Official search facility for finding the will of a soldier who died while serving in the British armed forces between 1850 and 1986.
• Tom's Wills - the index to UK wills 1931-1949.

Preamble to the Protestation (1641), transcribed by J.M. Joliffe.

• UK Schools & Colleges Database: provides information on more than 31,000 UK state and independent Schools and Colleges, and over 29,000 UK School, College and University websites (as of June 2016).
• MissingAncestors.com (archived copy) - contains information on staff and students at Industrial/Reformatory Schools & the like during the 19th and early 20th century.
• Anguline Research Archives (archived copy) produce CDs of a number of major public school registers.
• Universities: Brief biographical details of graduates of Cambridge or Oxford Universities are provided in either Alumni Cantabrigienses by JA Venn or  Alumni Oxonienses : the Members of the University of Oxford, by Joseph Foster, respectively, which are particularly useful for C of E ministers.  They are available in various forms:
  • Hard copies are held by many public libraries, including Reading Central Library.  
  • Cambridge Alumni Database free online from Cambridge University.  See also their research guide. 
  • Alumni Oxonienses: The Members of the University of Oxford, 1500-1714 and 1715-1886 free from Internet Archive.  
  • Online subscription access from Ancestry:  Oxford University Alumni, 1500-1886  and  Cambridge University Alumni, 1261-1900.

• Village Games (archived copy) by Colonel Alex Johnson describes games which Alex remembers from his childhood in the 1920s and 30s. Although the names of the games are those used in North-East England, most of these games were played throughout the country.

• UK & Ireland - Societies - links and information.

• A Vision of Britain Through Time from the University of Portsmouth provides a vision of Britain between 1801 and 2001, including maps, statistical trends (from 1801 to 2001 census data) and historic descriptions.

• For English and Welsh records see PRO Leaflet: Taxation Records before 1660. Scottish tax records are held at the National Archives of Scotland in Edinburgh.
• An indication of the taxes in force in 1823 can be found in Abstract of the Principal Tax Acts taken from the "History, Directory & Gazetteer, of the County of York", by Edward Baines (1823). This publication also gives details about the law relating to rent payable.
• Taxes in force in 1837 from "History, Gazetteer, and Directory, of the West-Riding of Yorkshire, with the City of York and Port of Hull." by William White (1837). Transcribed by Susan Johnson.
• Hearth Tax Online - a web site dedicated to providing data and analysis of the records of the hearth tax, which was introduced in England and Wales by the government of Charles II in 1662
• Valuation Office survey: land value and ownership 1910-1915 - a TNA Research Guide.
• A Short History of Rates 1601-2015, by Dan Kolinsky QC (archived copy).
• National Archives Research Guides on Taxation and on Taxation Before 1689.

Gibson, Jeremy, Mervyn Medlycott and Dennis Mills. Land and Window Tax Assessments. Federation of Family History Societies (1998) 72pp. [ISBN-13: 978-1860060540]

Gibson, Jeremy. The Hearth Tax and other later Stuart Tax Lists and the Association Rolls.  Federation of Family History Societies (1996) 80pp. [ISBN-13: 978-1860060182] [The Hearth Tax was levied between 1662 and 1689 on each householder according to the number of hearths in their dwelling.]

• British Library holds copies of all past and present Electoral Registers for view by personal visit. Their online guide provides details of what is available, both from them and from companies offering paid-for online access. 
• Lists of Names: Pollbooks and Electoral Registers (archived copy), by Stuart A. Raymond.
• Electoral Registers - "information about the electoral registers, electoral rolls, poll books from 1700 to the present day, how to access the registers online, . . ."