Have you ever hit a brick wall in your family history research, only to discover a treasure trove of new information just waiting to be uncovered? Join Dr Michala Hulme in this fascinating episode as she chats with Mary McKee, Head of Digitisation and Content Publishing at Find My Past, who shares her insights on the user-friendly interface, getting accurate search results, and the constantly growing genealogy records available on their platform. Learn about the project with the Greater Manchester record offices and archives, which has resulted in the release of nearly five million rate book records from the area, and the upcoming addition of millions of electoral registers later this year.
In their conversation, Mary explores the features of the 1921 census, such as the addition of employment information that provides insight into the social history of our ancestors. They also discuss the benefits of Find My Past's partnership with Reach PLC, enabling access to an extensive range of photographic records. Plus, discover the timeline and steps involved in digitising a record collection to ensure quality – a crucial factor for accurately piecing together your family's story.
As genealogy enthusiasts, we know all too well the excitement of uncovering a long-lost newspaper article that provides a glimpse into our ancestors' lives. In this episode, Mary explains how Find My Past's team in Boston Spa is continuously digitising pages and improving their search engine to help you find those hidden gems. So don't miss out on this informative episode, and learn how to enhance your genealogy research with Find My Past's extensive resources. Happy ancestor hunting!
As mentioned in the podcast - 15 top tips for searching British & Irish newspapers on Findmypast https://www.findmypast.co.uk/blog/help/newspaper-search-tips
Have you ever hit a brick wall in your family history research, only to discover a treasure trove of new information just waiting to be uncovered? Join Dr Michala Hulme in this fascinating episode as she chats with Mary McKee, Head of Digitisation and Content Publishing at Find My Past, who shares her insights on the user-friendly interface, getting accurate search results, and the constantly growing genealogy records available on their platform. Learn about the project with the Greater Manchester record offices and archives, which has resulted in the release of nearly five million rate book records from the area, and the upcoming addition of millions of electoral registers later this year.
In their conversation, Mary explores the features of the 1921 census, such as the addition of employment information that provides insight into the social history of our ancestors. They also discuss the benefits of Find My Past's partnership with Reach PLC, enabling access to an extensive range of photographic records. Plus, discover the timeline and steps involved in digitising a record collection to ensure quality – a crucial factor for accurately piecing together your family's story.
As genealogy enthusiasts, we know all too well the excitement of uncovering a long-lost newspaper article that provides a glimpse into our ancestors' lives. In this episode, Mary explains how Find My Past's team in Boston Spa is continuously digitising pages and improving their search engine to help you find those hidden gems. So don't miss out on this informative episode, and learn how to enhance your genealogy research with Find My Past's extensive resources. Happy ancestor hunting!
As mentioned in the podcast - 15 top tips for searching British & Irish newspapers on Findmypast https://www.findmypast.co.uk/blog/help/newspaper-search-tips
Hello and welcome back to Unearth the Past, a brand new family history and genealogy podcast brought to you by me, dr Mikaela Hume. I hope you have had a good week and you have been getting in a bit of research. My research has been terrible this week, i'm not going to lie. The only good thing about this week is I've managed to grow a courgette in the garden research-wise, and I'll talk to you about this later. It's been pretty blooming awful. Anyway, that's enough of my moaning and my brick walls. This week, ladies and gentlemen, we are joined by a very special guest. Please welcome to the podcast, mary Micky, head of digitisation and content publishing from Find My Past. Mary, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Speaker 2:Mikaela, thank you so much for having me. I've been enjoying the episodes so far, so you've been doing a fantastic job with the podcast and it's been just really interesting guests you've had and such variety too.
Speaker 1:There are only two websites that I subscribe to and if you listen, you'll know that one of them is Ancestry and the other one is Find My Past. I've been using Find My Past for years. There is so much that I like about it and, to start with, i really like you have such a friendly user interface, so when you go on, it's just so simple to search and I love that when the results come back, the person I'm looking for on page one, not on page 21, which is what I want when I'm working to the clock. So I love it, and thank you so much, mary, for coming on and speaking to me about it.
Speaker 2:I appreciate everything that you've said about Find My Past. I think one of the key things you said there about a friendly user face and that's perfect, that is what we love to hear is we do pride ourselves on the idea that we are a friendly site and that's what we hear the most from some of our customers. So we really appreciate that comment there and the accurate results. I mean with my role, i do work very closely with what we call our search team and they're the ones working on the search results and making sure that we're giving you the most accurate results possible. So they will be thrilled for me to pass this along to them.
Speaker 2:But yeah, accuracy is definitely a huge part of genealogy finding that specific record that can kind of open up a brand new branch for you or break down that wall that you've been hitting up against. And then the other thing with us is we're publishing every single week. We're publishing brand new records and brand new newspapers every single week. So if you haven't gotten the right record today, come back in a month and we might have it for you. Then You have dropped?
Speaker 1:Is it rate books for Greater Manchester?
Speaker 2:So I think it's about a month ago. I don't know times, i think, just stored it these days. But yeah, we did nearly nearly five million rate books from the Greater Manchester area And this is a project we've worked on Gosh. I think we've been working on it for about five years with them. It's a digitization project with the consortium of Manchester archives, so we have Manchester archives as well as Bolton and Wigan, so it's been a really kind of a long project but we're very happy to see the end results coming out now with the rate books. We also, later this year, we're going to be releasing even more millions of electoral registers from the Manchester area part of that same project. So millions of electoral registers.
Speaker 1:Oh, my goodness, really I love this. Oh my goodness. So this week, Mary, I've had a terrible week researching. It's been awful. It's nearly driven me to drink and I don't even drink. It has been that bad. That's terrible. I know drink or chocolate and I'll be honest, I don't drink, but I eat a lot of chocolate. It was that bad. Yesterday, You know, I procrastinated by baking bread. Honestly, I made I've never made bread in my life. I was like I'm going to make a loaf And it's all because of an electoral register that I need that I can't find. So, honestly, listeners, I have not set this up at all. But, Mary, if I just hang on for a few more months, are you saying that we are getting new electoral registers? Is it greater Manchester, Manchester, that sort of area similar to what we've done with the rate books?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely So. similar to the rate books, the same archive. So we've been in there digitising, digitising both the rate books and the electoral registers. So it will, yeah, it'll include the just double check on my list here. Yeah, it is, it is Bolton and Wigan, so across the Manchester area. So I do hope, like so is your research trouble in the Manchester area at the moment.
Speaker 1:It is in the Greater Manchester area.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I do have to say for the podcast listeners, we did not set this up at all. I kind of had an informed you ahead of time that this is. you know that we're going to be releasing these electoral registers, so I'm really keen to hear later in the year what we've been able to unearth for you.
Speaker 1:I just love it. So as soon as you drop those records, i went and I found all my ancestors on those records. It was absolutely amazing. So anybody, if you are in the Greater Manchester area and you have a relative and you are struggling to find them, or you just want to find a new record, you just want to find what they're doing check out the Greater Manchester rate books. They are on Find My Past right now. I know we've mentioned Manchester records before and Greater Manchester records. You have a fantastic array of local records, don't you?
Speaker 2:Absolutely Like, i think, with the. those census records kind of help you to build the basis of your tree. And then once you want to go, okay, i want to go a step further, I want to build that story about this person. That's where you really want to start diving into real specific record sets. So when you're on Find My Past at the top navigation bar you select search and there's an option there for all records. And literally from the moment I've started with Find My Past about nine years ago this is my one thing I preach about to everyone is look at all record sets And this is basically our card catalog for you know other type of users.
Speaker 2:So you go into all records and then you can just kind of start typing in. So if you're interested in Manchester, type in the word Manchester and it'll bring up all the records that are related to that area or with that in its name. But then you might be really you might be interested specifically in merchant AV, you know. so put that in and that's the records that'll come up. You know, you put in war and you'll see the military records all come together and any location you know.
Speaker 2:if you look up Yorkshire you'll see the wide variety. We have a massive collection of Yorkshire records as well, as, you know, surrey records and Welsh records as well. So you know that's the great thing about the card catalog is you don't actually have to land on Find My Past, knowing what it is that you're looking for. We'll help you on that journey and go to the all record sets and just even put in the name of the location, ideally from a county level. Most of our collections are organized by counties, so you could put that in. But then also we're talking about here, about the English and Welsh records. I mean, we have a huge collection of Scottish from the Catholic records and we have one of the largest online collections of Irish records as well.
Speaker 1:Something we haven't mentioned and it's actually one of the reasons one of the many reasons that I subscribe to Find My Past is the fact it lets you search the census by address. For me that is really important because sometimes you know we're not looking for individuals. I do a lot of work on the history of dwellings of houses. People know that I've done quite a bit on guest houses in Blackpool, the front of postcards And the fact you can search by address means you are able to search the census not by a person, but you can track your house going back on the census, and I think that is a real key plus point for Find My Past to be able to do that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we did that. We did that specifically in response to what we were hearing from customers that were getting really into house history. I mean, house through time has really kind of ignited that type of a passion of going what is. You know what's the history of my house? And I actually I moved house last year and I'm sitting behind me as a bundle of papers of house history information that I just don't have the time yet to dig into And I know it's going to be a huge rabbit hole once I start.
Speaker 2:But it's fascinating to think about the generations of people that lived in the same dwelling before you. You know why is the layout of the house the way it is? Could you have had a chef living there or a carpenter? I've heard a story of somebody discovered that they had a stone mason who was living in their house and it totally then opened up their eyes as to why there was such a elaborate, you know, decoration around the house and it really kind of opened up that connection with the history of the house.
Speaker 2:So we saw a lot more customers were coming to us with this idea of wanting to look at an address. So I think we started with the 1911 census and started an address search with that, and now we've expanded it to all of them. So from 1841 to 1921, you can look up the address. You start the address search by looking up the street and then you start to narrow it down by a house number after that And you look at them, you search it by each individual census year as well.
Speaker 2:So say, for example, for 1921, you also come across the sometimes where at some point your house could have been subdivided and there could have been two families in the house. So surprisingly, we do get customers coming back to us, particularly after the release of 21, who were a bit confused because they're saying all there must have been a mistake somewhere or in the digitization process, because there's two census returns for our house And that was that was part of the enumeration process was if there was two families in the same house but there was also two entrances and all it all had to do with the entrance. If you had your own entrance, you get your own form.
Speaker 1:Well, i remember when it was just on the 1911 census, and many people who are listening to this podcast will know that the 1911 census is great because it actually tells you how many rooms the house had. So what I was doing was I was tracking the addresses of my ancestors, who didn't necessarily live in 1911, but I was checking their addresses. I was then putting them into the 1911 census search bar to see what type of houses they lived in. So I was using the 1911 census to gauge what type of houses my ancestors were living in before and after the 1911 census. So I could figure out if it was, you know, if it was two up to down terrace, or if they'd come into a bit of money marry. And we're living in a semi, you know that's really that's a really interesting approach.
Speaker 2:I actually haven't heard that before and I haven't even thought of that myself, but yeah, it's definitely something that I will. I'll recommend to more people about, even if you know, yeah, there's not somebody specific that you're looking for in 21 or 1911 to still check out, keep checking out the address. That's great. Yeah, really good idea.
Speaker 1:That's just because I'm really nosy on it. I need to get out more. So we've spoke a bit about how you can use the address to basically research the history of a home or find. sometimes, as we know, things get transcribed wrong, So it might be that you're not pulling up anything by doing a surname search. However, you can search by address and see well, were they living there? And you know whoever's transcribed it, or the enumerator when he's written it down, just basically written it down wrong. So for me, using that address search has been really useful. Moving on, So what are your favorite find my past records. What are the records that you love?
Speaker 2:Well, i mean I don't want to. I feel like every time I'm now talking about find my past, i have to talk about the 1921 census, but I do have to say it is. It is really because it is dear in my heart. I mean I was part of the part of the team kind of setting up the project. I remember walking into the studio and I actually got to handle the books myself, which does add that personal connection.
Speaker 2:At the moment I'm actually doing my, my PhD with Birkbeck University and, surprise, it's on the 1921 census as well. Specifically, what I'm looking at is what I'm calling the graffiti on the census. So there's a lot of we we would have saw in 1911, everybody kind of knows about the Suffragette campaign and the votes for women, but in 1921, there was a lot more of that people asking you to, asking Lloyd George to build houses. You have people that are talking about divorce and they call it the rotten system of divorce. And there's some really heartbreaking stories as well, where I found some families had actually recorded the names of an individual, of a soldier, who had died in the First World War, but they recorded their name on the census as if they were still part of the household And then later you know the numerator crosses their name out to say that they're, that they're deceased And it's yeah, some of those are just are really heartbreaking. Especially, most often it's parents recording the name of a name of a son on those. That's that's what I'm kind of working on the most at the moment is really diving into that.
Speaker 2:Also, with with 1921, i love the the addition of the employment information. So now you have the name of the employer so you can you can piece together the kind of these, everybody that worked in the same factory or in the same local shop as well. So I think that's that's really interesting, because in our lives we know that your work is like a social hub, it's a whole second family for you and to think about. Like I know, you know I know friends aren't usually in your family tree and being recorded there, but it's nice to note that relationship of somebody that you worked along. You know your ancestor worked alongside for 30 years in the same factory. You know that's that's kind of really fascinating social history there.
Speaker 1:Can I just ask you what is the process, then, of acquiring records? So how does that work, how do you come about, and how do you come about getting records, and what is the decision process in terms of what records do you think would be good for the site, and are there records that maybe you think actually wouldn't be great?
Speaker 2:And yeah, i mean that's a very big, broad kind of question And I think it all there's. There's multiple layers to it, so there's one. One way that we would acquire records is a tender process, so something like 1921 or like the 1939 register. The National Archives know that they want these records digitized, so they put that out for public tender. But the local Cali offices do that as well. So you would have like Barkshire do that, or Guernsey. You know they put out a public tender and anybody you know ourselves and anybody else can go forward to say we want to, we want to digitize these records for you And we're we're often excited about a project like that.
Speaker 2:You know, when you can get a large scale and really bet into a project for a while, it's great. And then after that, the next way that we look at what we want to acquire next. I mean we do have such a breadth of records now We have most, you know, most of England and Wales are covered. Scotland is still. You know, there's still some patchy areas in Scotland that we want to kind of look at. So basically the gaps is what we call. It is like we review our collection on a pretty regular basis and go OK. Which areas have we not quite filled? You know where? where is it that somebody could be finding a gap in their tree and we're not?
Speaker 2:able to help. So that's the next step. after that, And then the third step is actually considering our tree. We now have opened up kind of our tree data in the sense that you can do the tree to tree hinting. We have tree to tree searching now so anybody can have access to about four million I believe, more actually, tree searches. so you can, you can start searching individual members trees and see what they have, And that's actually given us a lot of information as well about. OK, if you're coming to our site, where is it that you're looking for? You know, are you specifically looking for? do we have, you know, a large collection of trees from the Norfolk area? Well, we want to make sure that our records are matching that for you. So that's that's kind of the process in terms of how we think about record licensing.
Speaker 2:Is there sometimes, you know, some passion project or something really just interesting?
Speaker 2:We've done photo collections as well, And so we we also like to look at stuff that are contextual, stuff that adds that bit of color to your family tree. So with the Find My Pass photo collection, we have incredible photos for through our partnership with Reach PLC. So Reach owns the Daily Mirror newspaper as well as hundreds of other newspaper titles, And we created an online photo collection so you can look at like photographs from the Second World War, both the home front and both. you know both the war front. You can look at the Western front there as well as lots of regiments and even Africa and Asia as well, And even though again it comes back to the idea that maybe your ancestors name isn't actually on the photo, but you can find the regiment pictures, You can find what it looked like to be on the home front in Essex and you know, look at the women's auxiliary core exercises and what are their uniforms look like. And I love those kind of collections that add a bit of color and social context to everything.
Speaker 1:How long does it take And I know you're probably going to say how long is a piece of string? How long does it take Let's use a 1921 census Does it take for you to get those records, get them transcribed and then get them digitized?
Speaker 2:Well, it really depends on the actual collection. So, for example, 1921 was a rare collection. It was the largest digitization project ever completed between ourselves and the National Archives. So that was about five years in the making from the moment of actually winning the tender. So actually I think even longer, because you have to go through a tender process as well to the actual launch And there's multiple steps along the way.
Speaker 2:I mean, if we're starting a project, an original project will say we're the first ones going into the archive to create images of this material. So you have different steps. The first step is the image. Well, first step is assessment and making sure the material is stable enough to go through this digitization process. Do we need conservators involved or anybody like that? Then, once we start to capture the image of the material to say it's like a workhouse register, you know. So we go through the books, we're capturing images of that, usually with some kind of an overhead camera. After that it then has to go for transcription. So we have multiple transcription partners that we use goes through transcription.
Speaker 2:In between there's a lot of quality control happening within our team. So we're checking the images, we check the transcription output. It then has to come back in-house and then our data developers then kind of weave together. You have the images and then you have the transcripts and we got to make sure they all link up And then we then we have to publish them. And even during the publishing process there's a bit of curation making sure the transcript layout totally makes sense to the individual, making sure that all of the records are in a clear chronological order, and things like that. So there are. There's a lot of steps along the way. Now, in terms of how long that takes I guess in 1921 was five years I've seen us turn around like a small project of workhouse records. We could do that within six months if we wanted to. It really depends on the size of the project and also the material itself. How delicate is it? how much work needs to be done with it to get it digitized as well?
Speaker 1:Sorry to interrupt the podcast. If you are enjoying it and you would like to support the making of this podcast, please visit my Patreon account, which is wwwpatreoncom. Forward slash, dr mckayleehoome. Also, please remember, if you are listening to the podcast, to download and also give us a little like if you are liking it. And if you are watching it on YouTube, please remember to subscribe and hit that like button. Anyway, back to the podcast. Another thing I love about Find My Past is your newspaper collection. Now, i'll be honest, i did slightly hyperventilate because you've changed the front end of it. It's gone very snazzy And at first I thought what am I going to do? I slid down a wall. I don't like change. Literally, it's the friendliest change I've ever met in my life.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the newspapers. I mean I think when you asked before what's my favorite kind of record set. So I think of newspapers as a wholly different entity and it is definitely a passion of Find My Past. I think at the moment we have something around 68 million newspaper pages on Find My Past. But I would say, if you're somebody that's listening to this, in two or three months from now or years from now, that we have gone past that number for sure. We are publishing an incredibly high rate for our newspapers and that is down to our team. We have a digitization team in Boston Spa and they're doing amazing work there. Just for reference, boston Spa is in Yorkshire And it is the. It's the site of the British Library. So we have a scanning studio on site at the British Library, right next to the national newspaper building. So that's how we're constantly getting through millions and millions of pages And with the newspaper collection. I do very much appreciate your feedback on the search with that And it's the Find My Past newspapers.
Speaker 2:It did need an update for the newspaper search. It had started to kind of lag behind the rest of the record search infrastructure And as much as what you see when you come to the site. You can see visually it's different, but it's really the back end that we've changed. That you really like. You know, as a customer you can't really see that. So, for example, our name search before you would search for a name, say it's Mary McKee and it's searching the entire newspaper for Mary and McKee. But now we've made sure, like if you put in that name search, put in Mary McKee in name, we are searching to make sure it has to be within one to two words of each other. So maybe it's Mary McKee or maybe it's Mary Elizabeth McKee, but we want to make sure that it is as close together as possible, that we know for sure this is somebody's first and last name. Because you wouldn't want you know, you don't want that article to come back that Mary's mentioned at the beginning of the article and then John McKee's mentioned at the end of the article. It's so frustrating when you find that. So these are the types of developments that were actually happening in the background. I love the fact now we've updated that you can search for multiple names So you can search just with a comma, so you could work, you know, have Mary McKee comma, mckay, lecume, all in the one search form and keeping that all within the name criteria as well. So we know you're telling the search engine These are actual names and there's a certain way that they should appear in the article And then the other side of it when you're coming into, like the filters.
Speaker 2:We found that, like with the older search, the filters were just kind of clogging everything up, especially people that are using this on their phone. I mean, mckay, i'm sure you're a bit like me and you know we're sitting in front of our desktop all day and this is, you know, this is our main way of looking at these things. But we find that, like, a vast majority of our customers are actually searching and doing their family history from their phone now, and that's another way we've redeveloped the newspaper search to also to help somebody that's using their phone. Because there's nothing worse than when you're looking at a site on your phone and you can clearly see the site is not actually used, it's not developed for a phone, because there's just so much menus and all kinds of things at the very top and you go scroll, scroll, scroll to get away from that. So we wanted to simplify that experience as well and just make those filters quicker and easier to kind of come in and out.
Speaker 2:Of. You know when you're doing a newspaper search. You think I'm going to narrow down the list location and this year range. Actually, i'm going to take the year range out. I want to change the year range, i want to change the location. There's a lot of thought and process going into a research, so we wanted to make it quick and dynamic for you as well. While you, while you were doing that.
Speaker 1:And can you still do? I imagine you can. I've not tried it because I was actually looking for a person when I used it yesterday. But can you still do the keyword search? So say, for example, you're looking for a person, but I'm looking for an address, can you just type in the address, if that makes sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. You don't need to use the name field at all. You can just use the keyword search. in that sense You can look up just the location or an address, or look up a particular ship that you want to know more about. We did just update We have a blog on the site 15 top tips for newspaper search. We've updated that to align with the changes that we've made to newspaper search. so I highly recommend to anybody listening, if you're interested, to check that out.
Speaker 1:What I'll do. I'll put a link to that in the description. So if anybody's listening and they want to check that out, i'll link it in the description And then you'll be able to just click on the link and it'll take you to that blog. It sounds like a really worthy blog because I think if you've not searched newspapers before, they can be quite daunting because there's so many of them and so many different newspapers And obviously you know the stories often would just spread throughout all the different newspapers. So you might just think well, if my ancestor lived in Manchester, i'm just going to search Manchester newspapers. But in fact that story was probably covered by most of the country, so don't be surprised if it turned up in Essex, for example.
Speaker 2:Yeah, i always recommend that's. Actually the worst thing you can do is to start and go. Well, my family's from Essex, so I'm only going to search Essex newspapers. You would be surprised, because sometimes there's a really slow news day and so in a, you know, a Colchester newspaper will pick up something that's happening in Cardiff And you can, you know, read about it all across the country And it does seem.
Speaker 2:What I also would recommend is if you're searching for something, and in the newspapers they would often repeat the article, so but it looks similar, but it isn't always similar. So what I have found is I could be looking for something and I have four articles that look so much alike, but it's that one article that added that extra little bit of like mentioned he was 84 years old, or mentioned his you know he's from X parish And those are like those golden gems There was. Such important details that you need for when you're building a family tree is if you can get that age or or location. More than anything, a birthplace is incredible to find. So sometimes in these newspaper articles you will find that one out of the five identical articles will have something little extra for you to discover.
Speaker 1:And also, if you are looking in the newspapers, for example I don't know, maybe a specific crime you are researching because you like me and you have criminal ancestors, or you just are really interested in crime Check out the police news, the illustrated police news, because you may just on the off chance, get a cartoon sketch. I'll be honest with you is probably in somewhat sensationalized but nevertheless fantastic sketch of the crime in the in the illustrated police news again, which you can find on find my past. Do you have a favorite newspaper? or is that just me, mary? Am I just weird?
Speaker 2:No, no, it's not, it's not weird at all. I think the the illustrated police news, i mean that is an incredible newspaper and I do recommend, even if there's not something specific that you want to look up, just open up one of the issues of it and just read it. From you know, just as if you're reading the paper today, you know, just read it and cover to cover, it's so sensationalized and it's really just. It shows really the shift in news in that late kind of 19th century period of that, like the big stories, the big scandals they wanted to see. I also quite like an interesting one is the Paul Maul Gazette. It was very good, especially when there was changes to the divorce laws and you can get some real juicy divorce cases in there. And speaking of like crime or court cases, anytime that you find your ancestor has turned up in court and it can be frustrating because maybe you just found them on a prison register and it's just one line, you know, it's just a name and a date and a location and you're like I want the whole thing to be in there And you're like I want the whole story here. The newspaper is where you go and it's like you said it can go on and on as well, be multiple issues about the one case and all the detail that you get in, but I think, in terms of another kind of favorite newspaper, we did a fantastic collection of Suffragette newspapers which I found were really interesting, and it was.
Speaker 2:It was interesting especially like so I did Irish women's history And you know the Suffragette period is a highly kind of studied period and it is fascinating. Some of the some of the newspapers, like the Suffragette and the vote that we have on find my past and to read kind of the day to day activities. You can read, read the minutes of some of their local chapter meetings as well. It wasn't all you know. Not every newspaper is just about what Emeline Pankhurst is doing this week. You know you have loads of these individual groups.
Speaker 2:One of the societies that I started to look at was the Actresses League for Suffrage And they used to put on these elaborate plays as well And they would put on plays where you know you would have 20 or 30 actresses participating and they would all play or represent a different woman in history. You would have, like Jonah Bark there and Athena and all like such a variety, barbaglia and everybody on the stage And you can just and it vividly describes the costumes as well, so it's almost as if you're there and you can like see all these women on stage together. And all of it was part of like it was fundraising too, and just some of this, some of the lesser known campaigns that you don't really know about. Like women stopped paying taxes. They said, well, if I'm not a citizen then you shouldn't be taxing me, and so you see again, you'll also see them in the crime reports too, because now they're in trouble for not paying their taxes. So the Suffragette collection, i think, is interesting And we've also released over the last maybe five or six years we kind of started a lot more international titles.
Speaker 2:So you can find newspapers like the Royal Incase of Jamaica. We have the Homeland Mail as well, so you can from India, we have newspapers from Belize and Canada and China, and with those those really stretch out and you can start to see a lot more of. You know the British Commonwealth And, again, if you're looking, you know, specifically for family history, they often detail births, marriages and deaths that happened abroad. They will also mention the names of passengers. You know who's just arrived in India this week, so they'll actually have the full names and the family that came together. So those are quite interesting too.
Speaker 1:I don't have anything to bribe you with, unfortunately, like chocolate at the moment, or a cake, but are there any records that you know that will be getting released this year that you can share with us? that we should be excited about Mary, that we should be, you know, putting a little star in our diary, thinking these are coming up over the next few months? anything for us to look out for?
Speaker 2:Yeah, i mean we're really continuing with a lot that you, that we've come to be known for. Our Catholic collection is going to keep growing. At the moment we're working with Wyrton, cardiff at the moment scanning records there leads as well. So we've working with the Archdiocese of Leeds and Diocese of Cardiff as well, so expect those to come, so there'll be. Yeah, at the moment I think we have around 30 million Catholic records. That includes, you know, the Scottish Catholic collection too. So we're going to continuously add to that.
Speaker 2:We're also looking at census improvements. We are definitely placed to be for a few one census records. So at the moment we're looking at the 1871 census, going back through that and combing out a lot more about birth information, about occupations as well, because I think that a lot of these records, particularly like the staple ones that we know so well, were originally digitized, you know, about 10 years ago or longer. So the technology has changed now. So we do need to go back and we need to revisit these older record sets to make sure we're getting the most out of them and you're able to find everything that you need.
Speaker 2:This week we've just re-released the 1911 IR census, so again going back through that that was digitized years ago. So we're going back through and cleaning up a lot of the birthplace data And we also transcribed for the first time an additional 5,000 records from 1911 IR census that was never transcribed in the first run. So we have 5,000 brand new IR census records that had never been released before. So those are online for you to search now. And after that, i mean, we'll have just broad strokes, more military records. We have some really interesting stuff coming out of Coventry as well, so I'm excited about putting together a large Coventry release, hopefully later this year, maybe early next year. You'll see that as well.
Speaker 1:So it seems like that's something that maybe we don't see. when we click on, we just see the big releases, but it seems like all the time behind the scenes, you guys are thinking of ways that you can improve the records, re-scanning stuff, putting them through new systems. So there's certainly a lot of stuff that you don't see isn't there. That is constantly, i imagine, like what you said, re-looking at the records, going on behind the scenes and making it easier, i suppose, for us to research and maybe give us slightly more accurate results. One of the key plus points, i think, for Find My Past is the accuracy of the searches. I like to go on search a record and that record often can be found on the first page.
Speaker 2:That's fantastic, that is great to hear, and I think as well, like also when you're doing, when you're searching with Find My Past I mean a lot of people might try and do search all records And you can search everything that we have on the site all at one time, so billions of records you're searching at once. And then, on the left-hand side, start narrow down. At that point You can, of course, narrow down to your location, you know, is it Britain? Is it Ireland? Is it America? That's a key thing to narrow down, because you don't want to, you know you're not, you don't want to be looking for somebody in Essex and find somebody in Essex, canada, or something like that. But then I think as well I think we were talking kind of thinking back at the beginning of this. We were talking about like where should we go at this start? But I think once you've kind of bet it in and you've started, you've got your, you know, you've got your tree outlined Start looking at those strange categories that you don't really look at very often, you know. So step away from the burst, marriage and deaths and the census records and start going into the institutional records. You know you have, like the workhouse records. We just released another I think around 250,000 school records a few weeks ago. So school records are a fantastic collection as well, so you could look at those.
Speaker 2:And then after that, then, of course, the military collection. You can go into that. And again, the military collection, similar to what I mentioned with newspapers. You might look up somebody and you might. It might look like there's four records there that are, oh, this is the same person coming up in the same type of record. But do look at each one. There is a reason why we have put multiple copies on, because sometimes you have a, you might find a service file and then you'll find, you know, the, the burnt service file. You might find a second one that has an extra page in it and that has a little bit more detail for you. And then, yeah, even more employee records, workhouse records, things like that. So all of those kind of juicy side records that create the story about your ancestor.
Speaker 1:One last thing as well with birth records, you actually have the mother's maiden name on most of them. I think I'll be honest on all of mine, but on most of them that have come across, you have the mother's maiden name, which not all sites do. that. A lot of sites do have sorry the civil registration index on there, but it doesn't always show you what the mother's maiden name is. So I think that's really useful, the fact that not only have you got the civil registration index, but you can also see the mother's maiden name, which will then help you to go further back into your family's history.
Speaker 2:Yeah, mother's maiden name is such a vital piece of information. Now it is only available from about the mid-1st century onwards, so the earlier civil registration, you know, the beginning of civil registration that won't be available for it. But yeah, that is a vital piece of information. And, michaela, we've talked before about trying to find the women in your family tree and how difficult it can be as well. And the name change is a big deal, you know, and I even have to constantly remind myself.
Speaker 2:If I'm researching someone and I'm starting to look them up, i need to remember oh wait, no, i've come to find this person when they're married. So I need to figure this out and find that birth record and find their maiden name somehow, which often you can do that, sometimes through the marriage record. And then I guess another thought of if you are just coming to family history and you're using Find My Passer at any of the sites, those civil records. I can't actually stress how important it is to actually order the original record. You do have to go to the general register office to order that original certificate. You won't be able to find that online. We do have the index to help you with that ordering process. But, yeah, finding getting that original certificate is critical for your family tree.
Speaker 1:Especially when you're starting off folks. I've come across so many family trees, even some TV research, where the actual birth, marriage and death records were not ordered and people have gone up the wrong family tree and they've spent years researching it and it's not even the right family. It's a pain because it's expensive. If you're ordering a natural physical copy, It's £11. Unfortunately, there's not a lot we can. We can't do a lot with that. It is what it is.
Speaker 2:It does and you will. You'll get past that point as well. I mean, i actually I've a branch that I'm researching, and just yesterday I was looking at it and I think I might have to order four different certificates because I still don't know where exactly this person was born and it's you know. All the other factors are lining up, but I might have to just bite the bullet and order all four of them to find the exact person that I want. But the best thing is, though, once you get past you know, once you can kind of use those civil certificates and get past, say to around you know 1919, then you'll start to branch into the parish registers, and that's where you know the, that's where you can really kind of you don't have to order certificates anymore. You're in the parish registers at that point and you can start tracing the line through those. But it is just getting back to that point And the reason why I say around 1919, well, even to 19, you know 22 now the because with the parish registers we will have the 100 year rule for data protection on the birth records.
Speaker 2:So we're only allowed and that's by you know, by law we're only allowed to publish up to a certain point with the parish registers that they're agreement with, whether it's an arch diocese or a local county record office. That's how that process works. So those civil certificates, hopefully you don't have to order too many. But once you get past that point, then that's where you know access to exclusive parish records on finite past become really critical and really worthwhile of getting through that. And then you have the census records on top of it.
Speaker 1:So, mary, i always ask my guests this question and I always say it's one question and it's not, it's about 14, that I try and make it seem like it's one question. So if you could invite anybody from your family tree round for dinner tonight, what would you cook them And what would you ask them? Wow, um, it can be absolutely anybody in your family tree. Oh gosh, can I have two?
Speaker 2:I don't want to invite two. Yeah there's no one. Yeah, i mean, i guess my initial thought would be, yeah, my dad passed away 18 years ago, so initially I would say, okay, i'll have to invite him. Um, yeah, i guess what I would cook, i would cook a meatloaf and meatloaf and mashed potatoes. That was yeah, that was a family favorite.
Speaker 1:I was going to say we've not had meatloaf before. That's a new one for the podcast.
Speaker 2:I would say so. I feel like it's a very American, american thing. Yeah, so I would have to cook a meatloaf And then I guess, if I was so cheeky and I was able to have a second one, i would invite my great, great grandmother on my father's side, clara, and she migrated from Germany to Philadelphia, and I would just, yeah, i think I would just love to kind of really understand what that was like. So why did you decide to make that journey? You know, i just she was so young as well, and you know it must have been such a harrowing experience at that time. You know, months on a ship to try and try and get to Philadelphia. And what was it like when you landed there? Um, in terms of what I would cook gosh, i don't know. What would a 19th century German woman eat? I have no idea. My German cuisine is not very good, i have no idea. So I would probably end up just making maybe a nice roast dinner at that point, my favorite.
Speaker 1:Can you let me know when this is happening, because I'm definitely coming round for that roast dinner, mary, i'm all over it.
Speaker 2:Absolutely Yeah, you're more than welcome. Anytime you're in Northern Ireland, let me know and I'll make a roast dinner.
Speaker 1:You know what? I was actually in Northern Ireland filming Adrian Dunbar's and Neil Morris' family tree, had I have known, i had a good knock on. So that is it for this week's podcast. A massive, massive thank you to my guest, mary Mickey, head of digitization and content publishing operations from Find My Past. Thank you so much, mary, for being on the podcast, and thank you to you, to every single person that has downloaded the podcast or watched it on YouTube. I really, really appreciate it. I know that we have listeners in the United States, australia, ireland, germany, turkey, new Zealand, france, south Africa, canada, as well as over here in the UK. So thank you to every single one of you. If you haven't done so already, please remember to download the podcast, and if you're watching it on YouTube, please remember to subscribe and give us a like if you are enjoying it. These things really do matter. So thank you very much and I shall see you again next week. Have a good week researching. Bye.