TNA’s BT 27 ships’ passenger lists go online for the 1930s

TheGenealogist has just released over 2.7 million TNA series BT 27 records for the 1930s. These outbound passenger lists are part of an expanding immigration and emigration record set on

TheGenealogist that features the historical records of passengers who sailed out of United Kingdom ports in the years between 1930 and 1939. With the release of this decade of records, the already strong immigration, emigration, naturalisation and passenger list resources on TheGenealogist have been expanded again.

The fully searchable BT27 records from The National Archives released today will allow researchers to:

• Discover potential family members travelling together using TheGenealogist’s SmartSearch. This unique system is able to recognise family members together on the same voyage. In this situation it will display a family icon which allows you to view the entire family with one click.
• Find people travelling to America, Canada, India, New Zealand, Australia and elsewhere in the Passenger lists of people departing by sea from the United Kingdom.
• View images of the original passenger list documents that had been kept by the Board of Trade’s Commercial and Statistical Department and its successors.
• Discover the ages, last address and where the passenger intended to make their permanent residence.
• These fully indexed records allow family historians to search by name, year, country of departure, country of arrival, port of embarkation and port of destination.

Those with ancestors who sailed from Britain in the 1930s will welcome this fascinating new release, which adds to TheGenealogist’s current Emigration records, now totalling over 19 million and dating back to 1896.

For further information and a case study, see the article here .

TheGenealogist adds 1.9m Sussex parish records

TheGenealogist has added more than 1.9 million individuals to its parish record collection covering the county of Sussex. Published in association with The Parish Record Transcription Society, this second release of records for the English county more than doubles the number of parish records available for the area.

TheGenealogist now has over three million individuals in the Sussex Parish Record Collection. The new batch covers individual records of:

• 1,278,413 Baptisms
• 308,746 Marriages
• 327,091 Burials

The Parish Record Transcription Society (PRTSoc) has worked with TheGenealogist and S&N to make its records available online. With a combined three million plus individuals from baptism, marriage and burial records now fully searchable, it is easier than ever to discover ancestors from Sussex by turning to TheGenealogist’s parish records collection.

These records are published as a result of a major project undertaken by PRTSoc staff and dedicated volunteers to transcribe the parish registers of West Sussex with the aim of preserving them for generations to come. By working with TheGenealogist these are now also searchable by online researchers on TheGenealogist, which already has many parish records for other counties.

See here for more details.

TNA to research New Poor Law in three-year research project

The National Archives and the University of Leicester have been awarded a grant of £820,000 by the Arts and Humanities Research Council to undertake a three year research project examining poverty across England and Wales in Victorian times.

The project, In Their Own Write: Contesting the New Poor law 1834- 1900 will begin in early 2018. It will focus on the lived experiences of paupers and other poor people by sampling The National Archive’s collection of pauper letters which were bound into the collection of poor law union correspondence in records series MH 12.

Dr Paul Carter, The National Archives principle records specialist and co-investigator for the project said: ‘The hugely exciting aspect of this work is that the voice and experience of the pauper is put at the heart of the project. Nineteenth century paupers were not silent and the thousands of letters they wrote to the central poor law authorities are testament to this.’

Professor Steven King, Professor of Economic and Social History from the University of Leicester’s School of History, Politics and International Relations, and the principal investigator for the project, said: ‘Our analysis of pauper letters will be driven by key questions centring on the degree to which paupers were agents in their own history and how they sought to negotiate welfare in a system to which they have previously been thought subject.’

The pauper archive collection is very detailed and provides the opportunity to examine past welfare from the standpoint of those who were on the receiving end of it. The project will address questions such as how did the poor view the welfare they were offered and how effective were their complaints.