A rchivist ’s top tips
BEST WEBSITES TO AID YOUR RESEARCH
Many Glaswegian Kirk session records, have not been digitised by the National Records of Scotland, and must be consulted at Glasgow City Archives. This includes many nonconformist presbyterian Kirk session records, with their accompanying baptismal, marriage and burial registers. Registers of the Secession Churches in Scotland,d by Diane Baptie (SAFHS, 2000), is a useful guide. The Family History at the Mitchell initiative has placed many online collections at www. glasgowfamilyhistory.org.uk/ ExploreRecords/ Pages/Online-resources. aspx, including the Virtual Mitchell photographic archive, the Evening Times Roll of Honour for the First World War, and much more. Civil registration records from 1855 for the city, pre-1855 Church of Scotland registers, and Roman Catholic parish registers for several Glasgow churches are available on the pay-per-view ScotlandsPeople service at scotlandspeople.gov.uk.
The Glasgow Story ( theglasgowstory.com) has various essays on the city’s history, and includes digitised copies of the valuation rolls for 1913-1914, as well as electoral ward maps.
Maps of central Glasgow from 1881 and 1891 have been linked to searchable data from the corresponding Post Office Directories for the area at Addressing History ( addressinghistory. edina.ac.uk). The directories themselves, from 1773-1942, are available at bit.ly/1OcrbCe.
A handy list of old streets in Glasgow that changed their names before the 1940s is available at glasgowguide.co.uk/infostreetschanged1.html.
An interesting resource recently placed online by the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons in Glasgow is the smallpox vaccinations registers collection for the city from 1800-1825, available at rcpsg.ac.uk/library/digitalvolumes.aspx. A database of admission records from 1883-1903 for the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Glasgow is also held on hharp.org.
Some Glasgow newspaper titles are available on the British Newspaper Archive ( britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk), but Google News Archive ( news.google.com/ newspapers) offers free access to the Glasgow Herald (1806-1990), the Evening Times (19511990), the Glasgow Advertiser (1783-1801) and the Bulletin and Scots Pictorial (1951-1960). Ignore the latter’s erroneous listing on the homepage as `Bulletin Jan 2, 1957- Feb 28, 1957’; instead, access the full decade’s worth of material at tinyurl.com/kuonyvr.
The Glesca Pals site at www.glesga.ukpals. com hosts old school photos, a forum and more. Finally, indexes of burials from several Glasgow cemeteries are included at the Memento Mori site at memento-mori.co.uk.