Tyne & Wear Online
BEST WEBSITES TO AID YOUR RESEARCH
If you have a tablet or smartphone, try the Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums’ Hidden Newcastle app ( www.hiddennewcastle.org). The theme is ‘strange, extraordinary, forgotten’.
At its heart is a GPS-enabled Story Map, through which you can discover the often macabre stories in their original locations across the city centre – receiving push alerts as you wander past a site of interest. In that sense, it works best for visitors to the city, but it’s a fun and fascinating browse wherever you are.
This is one of several digital streams through which the Archive and Museum service is highlighting collections. There are blog pages (twmuseums.org.uk/engage/blog), a Twitter feed (@TWArchives), and historic photos on Flickr (flickr.com/photos/twm_news/sets). The most useful pages from a research perspective are the user guides and online catalogue (twmuseums.org.uk/tyne-and-wear-archives/catalogue-amp-user-guides.html).
The Palace Green Library of Durham University houses archives relating to County Durham, including now digitised collections of tithes and probate material. You can explore the North East Inheritance Database, for example, through familyrecords.dur.ac.uk/nei/data/intro.php, and entries are now hyperlinked to online images on FamilySearch.org.
North East War Memorials ( newmp.org.uk) aims to record every War Memorial located between the River Tweed and River Tees. There’s also the Armstrong WW1 Memorial Digital Memory Book ( memorial.ncl.ac.uk), where you can learn about 223 individuals associated with the university who lost their lives during the Great War.
Findmypast has various BMD datasets for the area and keep an eye on the website for news of Tyne & Wear schools admission registers appearing ( findmypast.co.uk/school-registers).
Other sites include Genuki’s Durham and Northumberland pages (joinermarriageindex.co.uk/pjoiner/genuki/DUR and genuki.bpears.org.uk/NBL) and the FamilySearch parish-by-parish guides (e.g. familysearch.org/learn/wiki/en/Northumberland_Parishes).