For many of us a particularly fascinating facet of doing research into our ancestors is to explore where they had once lived. For that reason any records that are able to provide us with an address are very valuable to researchers as with this information we can next move on to consult a map in order to find out more about our forebears’ neighbourhood. If the record set is already linked to mapping then this makes it even easier for us to see our ancestors’ road or street. However not all maps are equal, with some only giving the user just a broad area in which to try and pinpoint the property. With the aim of offering something better than what is available elsewhere, TheGenealogist’s team has tackled this with their recent update to their version of the 1939 Register. They have linked all the results from this pre-WW2 survey to their leading Map Explorer interface so that we can now see more accurately where our recent ancestors’ houses had been situated. Map Explorer maps will go down to house, street or parish level and so now the researcher has a great deal more detail than what is offered on most of the other genealogical research sites which include the 1939 Register.

In 1939 WW2 had been declared and the government needed to introduce identity cards and ration books for the nation’s population. To do this they recorded every civilian member of the public on 29 September 1939 and so created a record of where people were on that day. Service personnel who were already in the military would be recorded by the armed forces and so would not normally feature in the 1939 Register unless, that is, they were visiting a household on leave. As conscription had not yet begun at this time it would still, however, be possible to find many of our family members from these records.

Households plotted on historical and modern maps
Because the 1939 Register is now linked to Map Explorer, it allows us to examine the area where our recent ancestor lived on a series of georeferenced historical and modern maps including a Bing hybrid and satellite map. Searching for the famous Labour prime minister Harold Wilson, for example, before he embarked on his political career, we can find him in academia at this time.

He was christened James Harold Wilson and born on 11 March 1916; our search identifies him as an economics research fellow for the Ministry of Food and recorded as living in University College, Oxford in 1939. The modern Open Street Map shows us the road on which the college is situated and we can then switch between historical and modern maps to explore the area should we wish.

Locating the meritocrat’s suburban home
Our next search is for Wilson’s nemesis, Edward Heath, who would go on to defeat Wilson and become the Conservative prime minister in 1970 – and lose the next election to Wilson in 1974. We are able to find the 23-year-old law student in his parents’ house at 4 King Edward Avenue in Broadstairs. This time, by using the Bing satellite option on Map Explorer, we can see the type of area in which the Heath family lived. It would appear to be middle-class suburbia which, along with his father’s occupation as a builder contractor, sits well with the BBC’s 2015 description of Edward Heath as ‘the first working-class meritocrat’ to become Conservative leader in ‘the party’s modern history’ (see https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-33958116).

Searching the 1939 Register for an ancestor may be done in two ways. From TheGenealogist’s search page, using the Master Search, if you know the year of birth of the person you are looking for, then use this in the Year of Event field and select Birth or Baptism as the filter from the dropdown menu. An alternative way of searching is from the search page to scroll down to the individual record sets and select 1939 Register. This will give you more options to choose from including keywords, day, month and year and a more detailed selection of address, county, borough or district.

Osman Wilfred Kemal aka Wilfred ‘Johnny’ Johnson
A search for Wilfred Johnson in the 1939 Register allows us to discover just where he was on the day of the compiling of the 1939 Register. This is not the baby born to Boris and Carrie Johnson in 2020, of course, but that baby’s namesake and ancestor born in 1909 and who was the grandfather of the prime minister – at the time of the 1939 Register he was a timber merchant in Bromley.

From research we know that this particular Wilfred Johnson’s birth date was 4 September in 1909 and that he was originally called Osman Wilfred Kemal. He was the son of an Anglo-Swiss woman, Winifred Brun, and a Turk, Ali Kemal. Ali Kemal was the murdered Turkish journalist, newspaper editor, poet, liberal-leaning politician and government official who was for some three months Minister of the Interior in the government of the Ottoman Empire. Having dropped his Turkish names, Wilfred married Yvonne E.I. Williams (known as Irene) from Bromley in 1936 and by the time of the outbreak of war they were living at 14 Highland Road, Bromley.

Opening the full transcription details allows us to see directly underneath the result for our subject’s household a detailed map of the area.

From here we can then discover more by taking a look at the neighbourhood in which he lived. To do this we need only to click on the preview map which will take us to TheGenealogist’s Map Explorer and this will provide a great deal more detail. Individual buildings can be found pinned with the records of households so that it is possible to explore who the neighbours were and to see the features of the area. By changing the map layers on the Map Explorer the user can view how the area has changed over time or whether it has remained unchanged.

From timber merchant to RAF pilot
With the coming of war Wilfred Johnson joined the RAF Coastal Command and became a Wellington bomber pilot flying out of RAF Chivenor in north Devon. As a pilot he was tasked with patrolling the Atlantic hunting down the German U-boats that were sinking British shipping. The aircraft of No. 172 Squadron carried depth charges in their bomb bays and so when on 17 August 1944 Flight Lieutenant W. Johnson crashed on returning early to RAF Chivenor, it is not surprising that he and the second pilot were seriously injured, while other members of the crew were killed. We are able to make use of the RAF Operations Record Books in TheGenealogist’s Military Records collection to find the official record of the incident in the daily reports. Wilfred appears again on 6 October 1944 when he is posted away from the unit as being ‘Supernumerary, Non-effective Sick’ with effect from that date.

TheGenealogist has a wide variety of records for researching your ancestors and this includes the largest collection of fully searchable RAF Operations Record Books. These have enabled us to find the prime minister’s grandfather recorded in the Second World War. With TheGenealogist now linking the 1939 Register to its detailed mapping tool, researchers also have a fantastic resource for searching for where forebears lived in September 1939 just as World War Two had begun. In London and other cities this tool can locate properties down to house or street level and in the countryside; where named or numbered properties are less frequent, it will default to parish level rather than the much broader registration district that other websites show. Family historians will find that TheGenealogist’s records are a hugely valuable resource to use when locating their recent ancestors from the start of WW2. {