Ancestry

w ancestry.co.uk

The genealogical website promises a host of new features and updates to its DNA arm in 2019. This includes new regions for UK and Ireland designed to give more detail to people’s ethnicity results, plus improved cousin-matching.

The tail end of 2018 saw British Alien Internees, Wales Ecclesiastical Wills, and Western Front Association pension cards and wounded ledgers, which will be bolstered by an ‘other ranks’ tranche in February. Other expansions and updates include Holocaust records and probate material in January; Liverpool cemetery/cremation records; Norfolk Bishops’ Transcripts; a two million-plus index to Staffordshire births, marriages and deaths; 3.7 million Essex parish records going live in March (linking to images on the council website); and in April watch out for divorces up to 1918, Bristol nonconformist registers/Bishops’ Transcripts, and Pembrokeshire electoral registers. Poor Law records for North Lanarkshire are due around springtime.

In addition police and criminal registers from the West Midlands Police Museum collection (including photos of offenders) are due in March/April. The index will be free to search, and the collection dates from the 1860s through to the 1940s.