The clocks have been turned back, the temperature’s dropping and we’re heading rapidly towards that time of year when all I want to is curl up by the fire and read.
Information that I can access at home is always useful. But books can be expensive, and as for storage – well, you just don’t want to see the shelves in my office.
Information that I can access from my laptop is always welcome. Even more so when it’s free.
I’ve mentioned before the excellent Internet Archive site, with its vast collection of transcripts of parish registers. A link is given on the page “Useful Websites”, but here it is again:
archive.org/search.php?query=parish%20registers
Another useful (and free) site containing a vast array of books and transcripts (not just parish registers) is on Family Search:
I find the search facility a little wide: for example, using “Staffordshire” as a search term yields 2566 hits; “Wolverhampton” yields 516; “Tettenhall” yields 66. However, when I searched for “Penn” (once an outlying village, but now a suburb of Wolverhampton) the total jumped to a massive 17553: the results included documents relating to William Penn, Penn Township (Michigan) and Pennsylvania, amongst others.
Searching for “Penn Staffordshire” reduced the total to a more managable 390, but many of these still related to William Penn or the surname Penn. Adding “Parish Register” reduced the total to 107, but still some of the results didn’t relate (why did the Parish Register for Tipton appear on the list?)
All of which does sound as if I’m not particularly enamoured of this site. But I do think it’s a very useful resource: and once you’ve found a publication, you can download it for future reference.
I’ve added the link to the “Useful Websites” page.
