Find My Past
Find My Past (FMP) hosts a wide variety of census, directory, historical record, church and newspaper information available from across the English-speaking world and tends to concentrate on the former British empire and the UK. It is currently the only subscription site to provide access to the 1939 Register.
The 1939 Register (UK) was taken on 29 September 1939. The information was used to produce identity cards and, once rationing was introduced in January 1940, to issue ration books. You can search the Register to find out what your ancestors were doing on the eve of WW2. Discover exactly what they did for a living, maps of where they lived and even who their neighbours were. Or click on the address tab to search for an address you know, to see who was living there in September 1939. Then you can put it all in context. Read newspaper articles and see photographs from the era.
FMP also offers the British India Office collection which is a rich resource for those with ancestors who lived and worked in India. The records span the seventeeth to the twentieth century and include records of the East India Company, military personnel and civil servants, as well as other professions such as surgeons who travelled to the sub-continent. The Collection includes the returns of baptisms, marriages and burials, which enabled the government at home to know who was in India and were an authoritative source if information was required to resolve legal issues.
Ancestry
Ancestry’s historical record collection enables members to explore their family’s history using local and international records including the convict and free settler lists, passenger lists, Australian and New Zealand electoral rolls and military records, English, Welsh and Scottish censuses, birth, marriage and death records as well as user-contributed family trees, and by connecting to millions of other members making their own discoveries.
DNA test kits are also available and connections with others can be viewed without subscribing to Ancestry. Ancestry also owns Find A Grave.
Roots Ireland
RootsIreland is the flagship site for the Irish Family History Foundation. It contains data from 34 county genealogy centres on the island of Ireland. The main sources on the site are Irish Catholic and other church records of baptisms, marriages and deaths which are the most important source for tracing Irish ancestry.
The Irish Family History Foundation has been the coordinating body for a network of county genealogy centres and family history societies for over thirty years. The sources available vary for each county so please check the Irish Online Sources for details of what is available on the website.