Archives

New resource offers unique insight into life and death in Leeds

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Visualisations of the Leeds General Cemetery Burial Registers Index

A mine of information for genealogists has been made available online by the University of Leeds Library Special Collections. The burial registers of Leeds General Cemetery are now available for students and the public to access and use for research.

Containing entries relating to the 97,146 people buried at the cemetery, the 25 registers have been transcribed, digitised and made available through the Leeds General Cemetery Burial Registers Index:
https://library.leeds.ac.uk/special-collections-explore/Leeds%20General%20Cemetery%20Burial%20Registers%20Index

The registers record information such as name, age, gender, date of death and burial, cause of death, occupation, and parents’ details. It is possible to browse a full list of all the recorded causes of death and occupations and view charts of key statistics from the data.

Leeds General Cemetery opened in 1835 as a public burial ground. The University of Leeds acquired the company in 1956 and the final burial took place there in 1969, although ashes continued to be scattered there until 1992. Today the site is a public park, its name reverted to the original – St George’s Fields.

The digitisation and transcription project was undertaken as part of the Medical Collections Project, launched in November 2015. The project’s aim is to make medical-related collections more widely accessible, to encourage use, and inspire new research by creating online catalogues and digitising selected items. This includes improving the long-term preservation of this material by undertaking repackaging and conservation treatments where appropriate. The project is funded by a Wellcome Trust Research Resources Award, and runs until May 2018.

The University Library’s Special Collections hold the extensive records of the Leeds General Cemetery Company Ltd. Mainly consisting of business and administrative papers alongside the burial registers, the archive covers the lifetime of the company, with records dating from 1733 to 1992. A new catalogue for the Leeds General Cemetery Company Ltd Archive is also now available.

Archives

Ancestry Launch New 1.6+million nursing records 1891 to 1968

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https://www.rcn.org.uk/news-and-events/news/rcn-and-ancestry-launch-historic-nursing-records

[Posted on behalf of Teresa Doherty, Royal College of Nursing]

You may have seen some press releases / twitter / facebook information about our launch yesterday with Ancestry for Nursing records.

“Three major new collections of nursing records could show you whether your relatives helped save lives. With over 70 years of information available, you can now search for ancestors who were nurses between 1891 and 1968.

With names, addresses and enrolment dates from nurses registered with the Royal College of Nursing you can easily follow new branches of your family tree.

And there is more to discover from the Wellcome Library collection. If your relative was registered with the Queen’s Nursing Institute you could open up valuable new lines of enquiry, including the place where your ancestor was educated.”

There’s a nice article here: http://www.whodoyouthinkyouaremagazine.com/news/over-16-million-nursing-records-hit-web and a blog post from our Chief Executive here: http://blogs.ancestry.com/ancestry/2016/08/11/history-of-nursing-captured-in-new-nursing-registers/

Our website has a really good set of guides available to support users https://www.rcn.org.uk/library/services/family-history

 

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