Cemetery registers

Crime has always been popular with family historians. We all love a rogue (up to a point, anyway), and finding out you’re related to one can lead to some interesting avenues of research. The more seri

This World Mental Health Day (10 October), take a moment to reflect on the experiences of our ancestors who were mentally ill. How were they looked after, and where? Before the mid-18th century, the U

Family history website Ancestry (ancestry.co.uk) has added a major new collection of 49,105,506 electoral register records from Birmingham, dating from 1833–1972 and featuring notable residents, from

Most of us have unfortunate brick walls in our family trees – those frustrating relations who seem to have appeared into the world as if from nowhere. Perhaps a person does not feature in the baptism

Our bodies are vessels for life, but in death they undergo a cascade of chemical and biological changes

The former historic counties of Cumberland and Westmorland became Cumbria in 1974, at the same time taking bites out of West Riding of Yorkshire and Lancashire. Today the county’s archive service, Cum