For those of us with a longstanding interest in the subject, paid resources may be a great investment. But what about people who are beginning their journey of uncovering their own local or family history? In this blog, we will be sharing some of our favourite open access resources to use to research the past.

General Starting Points

Before you begin to study local history, you may wish to have a look at general history websites to see what types of local history interest you the most. Some websites we recommend for those interested in British History are the British History Online (www.british-history.ac.uk) and the Vision of Britain (www.visionofbritain.org.uk) websites. Once you have considered the areas of local history that may be of interest to you, you may wish to use some of the resources below.

Genealogy and Census Records 

Are you interested in learning more about your ancestors? While there are some excellent websites and archival documents available to view, you could begin your genealogical adventure using the FreeCen website. This provides a fantastic introduction to census records and can help you to begin to build your own family tree. You may also want to cross-reference the information you find on FreeCen (www.freecen.org.uk) by using the FreeBMD (www.freebmd.org.uk) and FreeReg (www.freereg.org.uk) websites, as they provide free searches of baptisms, marriage and burial records. This information has been collated from parish registers and non-conformist records and can provide a fascinating insight into your family history.

Once you have found out the final resting place of your relatives, you may wish to see if you can find their grave on Find A Grave (www.findagrave.com). This resource lists all the casualties buried in a particular site and can include information from other researchers as well as photographs of both the person and the grave marker. This can be particularly helpful if you are researching war dead, or individuals who are famous.

Many paid-for websites also allow a 14-day free trial, so make the most of these and see what you can uncover for yourself!

Family History

If you want to look beyond the genealogical side of your family’s history, you may wish to look at some of the broader records available for free. Digital Manager Paul Carter provided an extensive list of resources he has used in his own research, which covers a range of time periods. One of the first resources we would recommend is the FamilySearch (www.familysearch.org/en/) website, supplied by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which has a vast repository of digitised and scanned records that you can view from home. Furthermore, GenUKI (www.genuki.org.uk/big) has a huge index of resources that available for the public to access.

If you are looking for additional documents to those found through the census, you may like to use The Clergy of the Church of England database (theclergydatabase.org.uk/about) or Manorial Documents Register from The National Archives (discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/manor-search). Both of these provide excellent insights into the lives our ancestors led and are a great starting point for any local history researcher. 

County Archives and National Libraries

BALH Trustee Helen Palmer is also the County Archivist, Information and Records Manager at Ceredigion Archives (Archifydd y Sir, Rheolwr Gwybodaeth a Chofnodion Archifdy Ceredigion) (www.archifdy-ceredigion.org.uk). One of her top tips for any budding local historian is to look at the resources offered by their county or area archives. Most local archives have websites, which contain a wealth of information about their collections and advice on how to access them. Increasingly, there is also digitised material that can be viewed by the public. Most physical Archive repositories are free to access, and you will be richly rewarded by examining the documents held there that are connected to your own area of interest.

If you would like to learn more about the history of one of the countries that make up the British Isles, you may also wish to visit their national libraries. The National Libraries of Wales (www.library.wales) and Scotland (www.nls.uk) have a wealth of resources that are helpful to any local historian, including items relevant to that country from across history. These include journals, newspapers and in some cases interactive maps – perfect for those interested in how a local landscape has changed over time! Our Engagement Fellow, Catherine Warr, particularly enjoys looking at the newspapers on the National Library of Wales (newspapers.library.wales). These newspapers are free to read in both English and Welsh, and go up to 1918.

Historical Time Periods

If you are already interested in learning more about a certain time period, there are plenty of resources that you can use! 

For any budding medievalist, Catherine recommends the Medieval England Genealogy website (www.medievalgenealogy.org.uk). Here, you will be able to browse a wealth of resources from the period, from heraldry to probate records. These sources can give any local historian a fascinating insight into this era, and enable you to learn more about how these sources look in an archive. If you are interested in handwritten documents, you may wish to consider taking a course in paleography (the study of historic writing). Our education partner Pharos Tutors offers a remote learning course.

For more modern history, particularly from the Victorian period, there is a wealth of information about the legal and social histories lived through by our ancestors. Among our most-used sites include Peter Higginbotham’s website about workhouses (www.workhouses.org.uk) and the Old Bailey Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org). Both of these resources provide lots of original documents that have been digitised, and they can enable us to learn more about the judicial system and the social histories that our ancestors experienced.

For individuals more interested in the local history of the First World War, A Street Near You (astreetnearyou.org) is an excellent resource that helps you to learn more about the war dead who lived and worked near to you. If you are looking for a specific casualty, or to learn more about war dead local to you, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s website (www.cwgc.org/find-records) has all of the casualties it commemorates available online, and they have recently released how to research guides that will prove useful for any budding researcher.

Help and Support

When you are starting out in the local history world, and indeed have been researching for some time, you may find that you need additional help to further your research. If this does happen, why not contact your local family or local history society? They have members who have a wealth of information about the local area and may be able to point you in the right direction. You can find a list of local history societies that are members of BALH on our website (www.balh.org.uk/societies-az).

We hope you have found this blog useful, and it inspires you to begin your own studies into local history. Have we missed any that you think are great free resources? Let us know via email and we can share them in our e-newsletter and on social media.
 

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the British Association for Local History (BALH). Any content provided by our contributors is of their own opinion and is not intended to malign any individual, group, organisation, or entity.