Alan
E. Mann, A.G.
alan.familyhistory@gmail.com Accredited
Genealogist
www.alanmann.com/articles prepared February 2007
Getting the Most from
(The National
Archives)
The National Archives
was formed in April 2003 by combining the Public Record Office (PRO) and the
Historical Manuscript Commission (HMC). The Family Records Centre is run
jointly by TNA and the General Register Office (GRO). Great indexes, catalogs,
and guides have been placed online to give access to and help understand the
information available in British records stored at TNA. This session examines
the layout of the web site, what it contains, and how to use it.
The web site, located
at www.nationalarchives.gov.uk,
has a red bar near the top which offers a variety of pull-down menu choices. The general menus are Home, About us, Visit us, Search the Archives, Services for
Professionals, News, Shop Online and finally, Research, Education, and online
exhibits. This article is organized by
these eight menu choices and examines at least briefly each option.
Home.
This menu choice is the only one that does not have a sub-menu that appears
when you hover your mouse over it. However, the page
has many useful, valuable links. The links of particular value include
·
I’m interested in family
history takes you to a sub-menu page under Research,
Education, and online exhibits. It has a quick list of links to major resources
on family history that you can find elsewhere on the web site. Under Getting
Started, there are ten video clips about family history research. Other choices
are I’m interested in military history,
and I’m interested in history in general.
·
Search this site
is a great search tool. Enter a word or phrase, then click search to find pages
on TNA that mention that word or phrase. It often returns a long list of pages,
but recommends one that it feels most likely to be the one you want.
·
Are you new to this site?
takes you to TNA’s answers to an extensive list of
Frequently Asked Questions .
·
Beginner’s Latin is
an educational tutorial on Latin in family history records.
About us. This menu
choice is broken into sub-choices including contact information. The most
useful is Who we are, what we do, and how we
operate. This will give you a basic understanding of TNA and the
influence of its governmental mandates.
Visit us. The
sub-choices available under this pull-down menu include a brief statement on Why
visit us?,
as well as excellent advice on preparing to visit TNA. It explains about
ordering documents in advance, opening hours, and other issues essential to be
fully prepared for an in-person visit to TNA.
Research, Education,
and Online Exhibits. This is an extensive section of the
TNA website. The first level choices are Starting Your Research, Research
Guides, Paying for Research, Exhibitions & Treasures, and Teachers, Parents
& Children.
·
Starting your
Research
is subdivided into types of research you might want to do—academic, family
history, house history, local history, military history, or security history.
Each has a list of resources with links. Here, you can see major resources
available for family history. The family history sub-page also has a link to a
tutorial on how to
interpret old handwriting (the study of paleography), and such things as a
guide to death duty registers, and a list of online exhibits (including such
gems as an in-depth guide to family history, focus on Domesday,
Living at the time of the 1901 census, and many more). It also links to
information from the popular TV series “Who
Do You Think You Are?”
·
Research Guides is broken into two sub-sections,
namely record research guides and in-depth learning guides. There are nearly
two hundred record guides which describe specific records, telling what they
contain, how to access them, and how to understand the information given in
them. Record guides are listed alphabetically, ranging from Admiralty records
research to Zimmerman telegraph research. The in-depth guides are intended to
be detailed explanations to guide research activities. The family history guide
explains concepts and links to the record research guides in context rather than
repeat the information given in those guides.
Search the Archives. Hovering
over this menu will bring up a list of nine databases and a link to more.
Selecting more or clicking on Search the Archives will take you to a list of
five featured databases and thirteen additional databases. Unfortunately, this
is not a complete list of the databases available on TNA. Some databases are
found by following the links under Search the Archives, by checking the
website, or by hearing about it from others. For example,
1.
someone tells you
the index to Royal Navy Seaman 1873-1923 is online, but to find it you have to
go to Documents Online, of which the RN database is part.
2.
Someone tells you the index to Army personnel
discharged to pension 1790-1872 is online, but to find
it you have to do a search of the Catalogue, of which the Army database is a
part.
A
new National Archives Global Search searches across most of the TNA databases.
Read about this search at www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/catalogue/about.asp#search,
or try it out at www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/search/quick_search.aspx. The major databases are:
·
Documents Online includes
o
all Prerogative Court
of Canterbury wills, both indexed by testator, and digitized copy of every will
(viewed for a fee).
o
Many
WWI and WWII databases, including Womens Auxiliary
Corps, Medal rolls, Victoria Cross registers, and WWI diaries.
o
Death
Duty registers, 1796-1811
·
The Catalogue (formerly PROCAT) contains bundle by
bundle listing of the records at the National Archives. While making their
catalog fully electronic, the PRO also computerized various indexes and finding
aids. Thus, PROCAT contains an index to Chancery court cases, Army soldiers’ documents (WO97), soldier’s
discharge papers, Navy Board of Admiralty correspondence, and many other
records. For a list of SOME record indexes in PROCAT, see major cataloguing projects completed at www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/about/operate/meetings/catboard/catprog.htm.
If you have a PRO document reference (e.g., WO 121/34/122), type the document reference
into the type reference here box and press search to find out what it is. If
you type in a record class (e.g., BT 26), you will get a summary description of
the class. You need to click on the button to the right like the one shown here 
, which brings
up a list with a button like this: 
. When you click
on this button, you get the bundle by bundle detail.
·
A2A (Access to Archives) contains descriptions of records at 403
record offices in the
·
Manorial Documents Register (MDR) is a catalog of documents that survive
from
·
National Register of Archives (NRA) is an attempt to have a single catalog
for all British historical records. The NRA contains information about the
location and nature of historical records that have been created by some 46,000
individuals, 9,000 families, 29,000 businesses and 75,000 organizations.
·
Other
collections include E179, Equity
Pleadings, Electronic Records Online (EROL),
MacMillan Online, Hospital Records, Trafalgar Ancestors, Reference
Library Catalog, and Accessions to
Repositories
·
In
addition, there are TNA cooperative data hosted at Ancestry
·
TNA is also working with FindMyPast
(formerly 1837online) to digitize the departing passenger records from British
ports (1890-1960). This is called AncestorsOnBoard,
with 1890-1899 completed so far. Check it out at www.ancestorsonboard.com.
Services
for Professionals isn’t what most of us expect, because we
forget that TNA services more than just genealogists and family historians.
This section is intended to provide direction and assistance to archivists. The
part in the section that’s potentially useful to genealogists is the Archives
Portal. This is a gateway to archival resources and projects for the
News
is the forum for making announcements about changes in the TNA website, plans
for the future, and newly added databases. The sub-choices here are news, new
document releases, contact the press office, and free email updates. Choosing
free email updates will cause the news announcements to be delivered to you by
email, thus avoiding the need to check back periodically (assuming you read
your email!). Note on the home page that you can select RSS feed to be
delivered to your news aggregator.
Shop
online is the final menu choice. This allows you to
subscribe to Ancestors magazine, purchase guide books published by TNA or
affiliated publishers, or order copies of documents for a fee.
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©Copyright 2006-7 by Alan E. Mann. All
rights reserved. Written permission to reproduce all or part of this syllabus
material in any format, including photocopying, data retrieval, or the
Internet, must be secured in advance from the copyright holder.