Research links, and a few tips, for visual resources and old media.

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. Online from March 2013, with more content gradually being added.
• National Library of Scotland has a collection of ‘broadsides’.
• The Scotsman Digital Archive.
• Isle of Wight County Press Archive, new 2014.
• Cumberland & Westmorland Newspaper Archives – transcriptions.
• The Gazette publishes official notices (not technically a newspaper) in London, Edinburgh and Belfast. Revamped website December 2013.  Bankruptcy, death notices (for claims on the estate) etc.
• Irish Times.
• Irish Newspapers Archive.
• Google’s Newspaper Archive. The British ones might take a bit of finding – mainly US and Canada, but a few Scottish ones 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 (NB 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 – more than three million pages of digitised New Zealand newspapers and periodicals (1839 – 1945).
• Ancestry sites have material sourced through 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.
• Historical Gazetter of England’s Place-Names Recording the varying spelling etc. of towns and villages, illustrated via A Vision of Britain mapping. An academic tool to “facilitate accurate searches across resources”, but more than that.
• The 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).
• National Library of Scotland Maps Section has been putting online a range of maps from across the UK: England and Wales 6 inch OS 1842-1952 – see current counties covered (at April 2015 includes Buckinghamshire, Essex, Kent, London, Surrey and Sussex). Plus their very detailed 5 feet to a mile 1890s London maps.
• Rail Map online – Historic railways, railroads and tramways.
• Distribution of surnames in Britain from publicprofiler site.

Specific Places

• Locating London’s Past.
• 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.)
• 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: Leeds/W Yorks Tracks in Time; Berkshire enclosure maps.
• Bristol – Know Your Place. 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)

Locating Cutlock & Co articles using (modern) Google Maps is on the Places page.

Visual Resources

• Gravestone Photographic Resource, British War Graves, War Graves Photographic Project.
• Britain from above Historic aerial images of places, 1919-1953.
• 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.
• Cumbria Images Collection from the county archives.
• Red Rose Collections images of Lancashire people, places and events from council heritage collections.
• Leodis photographic archive of Leeds.
• 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.
• Gathering the Jewels “images of objects, books, letters, aerial photographs and other items from museums, archives and libraries throughout Wales”. Also try People’s Collection Wales.
• Rhondda Cynon Taf Libraries Digital Archive has over 20,000 digital images taken from (south Wales valleys) local history collections. Or did have – disappeared July 2016?
• Scotland on Film, material originally compiled for BBC series.

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

When was that photo taken?

• FindMyPast blog has Ask the expert items by ‘photo detective’ Jayne Shrimpton.
• Also an earlier series on dating family photos – note this links to a large page with 6 articles and loads of images.
• Some useful tips and links on determining age of photos from Roger Vaughan Picture Library.