Research links, and a few tips, for visual resources and old media. Part of Cutlock & Co’s Research links set of pages. Further suggestions welcome.

Newspapers

• British Newspaper Archive – the digitised British Library collection is also gradually being added to FindMyPast and Genes Reunited. There is a charge.
• Welsh Newspapers, from National Library of Wales, free. More content gradually being added.
• National Library of Scotland has a collection of ‘broadsides’.
• The Scotsman Digital Archive.
• Isle of Wight County Press Archive.
• Cumberland & Westmorland Newspaper Archives – transcriptions.
• The Gazette publishes official notices (not technically a newspaper) in London, Edinburgh and Belfast. Bankruptcy, death notices (for claims on the estate) etc.
• Irish Times.
• Irish Newspapers Archive.
• Europeana (from the European Union) has a newspapers collection – four centuries of newspapers from across the continent.
• Google’s Newspaper Archive. The British ones might take a bit of finding – mainly US and Canada, but a few Scottish too.
• Chronicling America from US Library of Congress.
• Old Fulton NY PostCards has loads of Old New York State Historical Newspaper Pages, search to find a pdf (note: quirky site).
• Nebraska Newspapers, a project of University of Nebraska Lincoln and Nebraska State Historical Society.
• Seward Memorial Library Digital Archives – local papers from this part of Nebraska. New 2017? – see Local papers for local people.
• Australia’s Trove.
• Papers Past – New Zealand newspapers and periodicals from 19th and 20th centuries. Also parliamentary papers, with other documents to come.
• Ancestry has Newspapers.com, which can be added to your subscription. Largely American titles.
• NewspaperArchive.com.
• Wikipedia list of online newspaper archives.
• Project Gutenberg has old periodicals as well as books which are out of copyright.

Historical Maps

Plus geography, place names, etc.

Helpful note from WDYTYA magazine, Feb. 2015, on Ordnance Survey maps: The original survey started in 1784 and updates, such as railways, were overlaid on later maps. Thus, a map may show a village as it was in 1790 with a railway built in 1850 running past it. A second survey started in 1840 … produced much less anachronistic impressions …

• Familysearch has a set of useful boundary maps for 1851 – registration districts, counties, diocese etc.
• British History Online has a historic maps section, including large scale 1:2500 for some areas.
• A Vision of Britain through time has an old maps section, and lots of historical info on places.
• Old Maps Online is “an easy-to-use gateway to historical maps in libraries around the world”.
• British Historic Towns Atlas features Norwich, among other towns.
• Peoples Collection Wales has a locate section where you can view old Ordnance Survey maps, 1st to 4th Edition (1868 to 1954).
• Welsh Tithe Maps, Places of Wales, from National Library of Wales.
• National Library of Scotland Maps Section has been putting online a range of maps from across the UK. This includes Ordnance Survey, with for instance their England and Wales 6 inch 1842-1952 series, and a counties index list. Plus their very detailed 5 feet to a mile 1890s London maps.
• Rail Map online – Historic railways, railroads and tramways.
• Populations Past shows various population data (e.g. infant mortality, working women) extracted from 1851 to 1911 censuses for England and Wales, against old maps.
• Distribution of surnames in Britain from publicprofiler site – GB search may not work, try their world family names map instead.
• Map History info site.
• Check the coverage of tithe maps and the 1910 ‘Domesday’ survey at The Genealogist (the site is still developing this resource, with only a little of England covered at Jan 2019).
• Cassini Historical Maps is a commercial source.
• New York Public Library has “more than 20,000 cartographic works as high resolution downloads” for open access. Mainly New York state and along the eastern seaboard?

Specific Places (UK)

• Locating London’s Past. “Search a wide body of digital resources relating to early modern and eighteenth-century London, and .. map the results on to a fully GIS compliant version of John Rocque’s 1746 map.” Also see Layers of London – map layers include Tudor, before and after the Great Fire, and mid-18th century.
• The ‘Poverty Maps’ from Booth’s famous London survey (1886-1903) are available from the London Schools of Economics Charles Booth Online Archive.
• maps.thehounthouse.com has various useful London resources, such as lists of street name changes. Also see rayment.info lists. (Both links from WDYTYA magazine letter, March 2015.)
• Historical Maps of Norfolk from the county council: tithe maps, enclosure maps and more via the Map Explorer.
• Manchester Historical Maps – overlay various old maps onto current.
• University of Manchester Online Map Collection, Manchester and environs from the late 18th century, including ship canal.
• Online versions of Old Maps of Lancashire produced by the county council’s Archaeology Service.
• Tithe maps: West Yorks tithe maps; Berkshire enclosure maps; Cheshire alongside OS 1870s.
• Know Your Place West of England originally just covered Bristol (now Bath, Somerset, Glos, Wilts too) Select old map layers and accompanying data markers too, or make your own contributions on the community layer.
• History Maps: Bath.
• Dorset Explorer Another place where you can select old map layers – tweak visibility sliders to see current/other map layer.

Open Domesday – the first free online copy of Domesday Book – is worth a mention here. No old maps, but info about places from the 11th century.

Cutlock and Co articles:

• Exploring Historical Maps (March 2012)
• Historical maps online – update (Feb. 2014)

Visual Resources

• Gravestone Photographic Resource, British War Graves, War Graves Photographic Project.
• Britain From Above Historic aerial images of places, 1919-1953.
• Landscape Histories from the Air, new 2019 from Cambridge University Digital Library.
• Churches of Britain and Ireland aims “to have at least one photo of every existing church in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the Isle of Man, and the Channel Islands, and where possible, photos or artwork of churches no longer in existence”. County index.
• Historypin – where people come together to share their historical pictures and stories.
• Old UK Photos.
• Francis Frith postcards.
• Wellcome Trust Images – historical as well as contemporary, includes maps, engravings of buildings etc.
• Historic England Archive (previously English Heritage, National Monuments Record) – photographs, plans, reports etc.
• Cheshire Image Bank.
• Cumbria Images Collection from the county archives.
• Red Rose Collections images of Lancashire people, places and events from council heritage collections.
• Manchester Local Image Collection – over 80,000 images of the city and suburbs (a city council website). Also check TimePix, orginally set up to share historic photos from Manchester.
• Leodis photographic archive of Leeds.
• Image Leicestershire.
• Nottinghamshire’s Inspire Picture Archive.
• Picture Oxon – historic images of Oxfordshire and the Thames Valley from the 1850s on, from the county council.
• Picture Sheffield – old images and maps held by the city council.
• West Sussex Past official picture collection.
• People’s Collection Wales.
• Rhondda Cynon Taf Libraries Digital Archive has over 20,000 digital images taken from (south Wales valleys) local history collections.
• Canmore – national record of the historic environment of Scotland. Images and info on places.
• Mitchell Library photos of “Glasgow’s buildings and streets as well as people going about their daily lives”.
• Shetland Museum Photo Library.

Also try a search on Flickr. For instance, Public Records Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) has a bunch of wedding and family photographs here.

Film

• British Film Institute has plenty of material in its archives which is free to view online. Also try its Britain on Film project.
• East Anglian Film Archive.
• London’s Screen Archives.
• National Library of Scotland’s Moving Image Archive.
• Scotland on Film, material originally compiled for BBC series.

When was that photo taken?

• FindMyPast blog has Ask the expert items by ‘photo detective’ Jayne Shrimpton, but nothing beyond 2016? There was also an earlier series on dating family photos.
• Some useful tips and links on determining age of photos from Roger Vaughan Picture Library.
• Suggestions from WDYTYA mag Feb. 2017: Daguerreobase – a database of daguerreotype photos (very early). FashionEra selection of wedding photos from various times – American and British mainly? – for comparisons. Photographers of Great Britain and Ireland has a dating section, with info on different types of photos and a ‘dating wizard’ (a small fee). Early Photographers (UK), Sussex PhotoHistory,