Free ‘First Steps’ package helps new genealogists

TheGenealogist is offering a package of its most useful record sets, its image archive and digital Discover Your Ancestors magazines for beginners to use for three months. No card details are required, no subscription: just completely free.

With so many of us staying at home, now is the perfect time to make a start on your family tree. It’s the perfect hobby; both rewarding and mentally stimulating.

Anyone can begin their discovery now at thegenealogist.co.uk/first-steps. The package includes:

• Complete birth, marriage and death records index for England and Wales 1837-2005
• English and Welsh census records to see where ancestors were living in 1911
• TreeView, the online family tree builder
• Image archive of churches, places and people from the past
• The high-quality monthly digital Discover Your Ancestors magazine packed full of stories, case studies, social history articles and research advice.

TheGenealogist’s First Steps package will give those beginning their journey on the compelling road to discovering their ancestors some excellent family history resources.

You can find out more about this package at www.thegenealogist.co.

uk/first-steps and read an article on how to start your family history here: www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2020/how-to-start-your-family-history-1245/

Latest update
TheGenealogist’s Free First Steps offer has proved incredibly popular among those looking to start a new hobby while staying at home in the pandemic. Now, the collection has been expanded with even more new records.

Mark Bayley, Head of Content at the site said: ‘We have been overwhelmed by such a positive response to our Free First Steps package and it has encouraged us to do even more. We have decided to help users trace back even further, adding yet more free resources.’

Now you can extend your research as TheGenealogist has added a further two years of censuses for England and Wales! These fully searchable records cover the years 1891 and 1901.

People on social media are already talking about TheGenealogist’s First Steps:

• “This will be a life saver for many people” – Gwyneth, Wales
• “You are helping my lockdown [be] so much better and productive.” – Rachel, Coventry
• “What a very generous offer” – @Book_magpie
• “Thank you. I can now do more family research” – Lorraine, New Zealand
• “Thank you for this kind offer. I am finding it really helpful for researching my family.” – J Tafe

Newly released property records for parts of Surrey

TheGenealogist has just released data for the Kingston upon Thames, Hook and Malden areas into its Lloyd George Domesday Survey Records collection on its unique and powerful Map Explorer. Researchers can use these fully searchable property records to find where ancestors from Kingston had lived or ran a business in the 1910-1915 period. You can now search over half a million individuals in this collection.

Family history researchers searching for where their ancestors lived in the period before the First World War are able to find the actual plots for buildings and explore the district as it was in that period on large scale OS maps linked to the field books containing descriptions of the properties. The Lloyd George Domesday Survey records are part of TheGenealogist’s powerful Map Explorer that gives users a number of georeferenced historic map overlays and modern base maps to view. Sliding the opacity controls makes it possible to see how the topography has changed over the years as one map fades to another.