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Online Resources: Find My Past

  • 9th April 2020

UPDATE 18/3/21 – There is a monthly limit for records which can be viewed which was reached for the first time in February and has just been reached for March. This will reset on 1st April

We’re pleased to announce that Find My Past are allowing access at home for our customers during this period. For the past few years we have provided access to Find My Past free of charge in The Hive, thanks to a partnership with them. With people asked to stay at home, and The Hive closed, they have allowed access to Worcestershire customers.

Find My Past is one of the top family history websites with billions of UK records available. It has been free in The Hive for the past few years due to a project where hundreds of our school admission registers were digitised and uploaded, providing details of over 100,000 Worcestershire school children. It also contains civil registration indexes, census details and parish registers, plus many other databases.

To avoid this opening up of their records being taken advantage of, they have put (generous) daily and monthly limits on the number of records which can be accessed. They have also asked us to ensure the Worcestershire login is just passed on to our customers. So if you would like to use Find My Past please email explorethepast@worcestershire.gov.uk with your library card number and we will provide the details.

We hope this will be useful to you, and would be interested in hearing about what you uncover!

We are also working on seeing what other resources we can make available, so keep checking our blog and social media. We’ll also be sharing some tips for those who want to begin or restart their research.

 

British History Online

One of several websites opening up their resources is British History Online. This is a not-for-profit digital library based at the Institute of Historical Research. It brings together material for British history from the collections of libraries, archives, museums and academics. These primary and secondary sources, which range from medieval to twentieth century, are easily searchable and browsable online. Some of the resources, such as the digital versions of the Victoria County Histories, are already free, but others required a subscription.

More details on their offer at https://blog.history.ac.uk/2020/03/british-history-online-makes-all-research-content-free-to-individual-users/

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