100,000 new headstone records go online

The International Headstone Collection at TheGenealogist has been boosted with 100,000 new records, bringing the total to nearly 400,000 records in the collection available for all Diamond subscribers of TheGenealogist to search.

Included are some extremely interesting memorials that allow researchers to see details about ancestors that have been immortalised on gravestones. These inscriptions can provide the family historian with useful information about the deceased and their family as commemorated in various churches and cemeteries.

The headstone records released cover various burial places and include, at Mells St Andrew, Somerset, Siegfried Sassoon, Ronald Arbuthnot Knox, a translator of the Bible, and some members of the Bonham Carter family and the Asquith family.

In St Peter’s Churchyard, Bournemouth, is the grave of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. She was the widow of the Romantic Poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was cremated in Italy – though some of his mortal remains are reputedly also interred in this grave having been buried along with their son Sir Percy Florence Shelley.

The Headstones Collection is also a record layer on TheGenealogist’s powerful Map Explorer, which enables users to look into the area surrounding the location of the churchyard or cemetery. With the tool’s different historical and modern georeferenced maps, the researcher can discover the area and see the neighbourhood’s streets where the deceased ancestor may have lived, worked and played.

The International Headstone Collection is an ongoing project where every stone photographed or transcribed earns volunteers credits, which they can spend on subscriptions at TheGenealogist.co.uk or products from GenealogySupplies.com. If you would like to join, you can find out more about the scheme at: ukindexer.co.uk

Read TheGenealogist’s article about Mary Shelley here .

TheGenealogist cuts cost of pinpointing ancestors

TheGenealogist has been praised for its innovative tools that allow you to discover exactly where your ancestors lived, using its Map Explorer. This innovative feature has now been added to Gold and Starter level subscriptions.

A significant number of databases – including the 1891, 1901 and 1911 census, plus TheGenealogist’s Image Archive pictures and the Domesday Book 1086 – are now available with pins on georeferenced maps in Map Explorer. This makes Starter & Gold Subscriptions powerful resources for researchers to see where their forebears lived, as well as to investigate the neighbourhood and surrounding area. Accessing Map Explorer on a mobile allows researchers to walk in the footsteps of ancestors and discover where homes, schools, places of work and other buildings may once have stood but have now disappeared.

To find out what’s included in the discounted Starter and Gold subscriptions go here .

To read about using the Census collection, Image Archive and Domesday Book 1086 linked to mapping for an area recently in the news see this article here .