Lots of new updates in February!

Greetings to my genealogical researching friends!

It has been a couple of weeks since my last post and I want you all to know what has been added to the OGI, so here is a detailed list!

• Cemetery Registers collection updates from Ancestry
• Cheshire Civil Regisration updates
• Derbyshire Parish Registers and Memorial Inscriptions (Findmypast and archive.org)
• Dorset Parish Registers from opcdorset.org
• Gravestone updates from gravestonephotos.com
• Greater London Marriage Index - A new collection from Findmypast (actually a renamed and merged collection of existing data)
• Hampshire registers from FamilySearch and Findmypast
• Kent Canterbury Parish Register collection from Familysearch (covers 58 parishes)
• Kent monumental inscriptions from archive.org
• Lancashire Online Parish Clerk updates
• Lancashire Civil Registration updates
• Lincolnshire parish register collection from FamilySearch is now complete on the OGI
• Norfolk Baptism Project updates
• Nottinghamshire Burial Index from Findmypast
• Staffordshire Burial Index updates
• Staffordshire Civil Registration updates
• Sussex parish registers and memorial inscriptions on archive.org
• Wiltshire parish registers and memorial inscriptions on archive.org
• Worcestershire Extracted records collection from Ancestry (this is a new collection which is identical to an exisiting collection - I have contacted Ancestry to ask why!)
• Yorkshire Baptisms, Banns, Marriages and Burials updates from findmypast
• Yorkshire Civil Registration updates

Total of 5,217 data sets added or updated since my last post.  February has been busy!

There is more coming over the next few weeks then I will be off to the USA for my daughter's wedding (April 6th!) so may be quiet for a couple of weeks.

Thanks to Val, a new friend of the site who works at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah (the largest genealogical library in the world), more people will be learning about why ogindex.org is a great site to track down an English or Welsh ancestor.

Val sent some news this week from RootsTech in Salt Lake City:  

Carol, friend from England, and I ended up educating our neighbours about the OGI and one of them said, "I want to go home NOW and play with it!"   Other comments from Americans who joined in were "AWESOME!", "FABULOUS!"  And, very important, ..... "Why didn't we know about This?"

Between the two of us we taught 5 people!

She is so happy with ogindex.org, she is actively promoting its use and will be teaching others about it in a training course for British research, as well as mentioning it on a daily basis to guests with British ancestry.   I am always happy to learn when the OGI is being enthusiastically used around the world.  Thanks to any of you who have promoted the website by word of mouth (or email!)

Have a good March and stay warm (especially thoses suffering through snow and freezing temperatures around the UK).

Best wishes from Staffordshire,

Tim Manners
http://ogindex.org

New Discoveries in Sussex this week

The collection of data added to the Online Genealogical Index continues to grow!  There are now over 371,250 sets for thousands of places in England, Wales and the Isle of Man.  The OGI is the FIRST place to look for data as it includes all collections from familysearch.org, ancestry, findmypast, freereg, findagrave, Online Parish Clerk sites, billiongraves, gravestonephotos, genuki, ukbmd, and hundreds of other resources.  I continue to be amazed by the many individuals and societies who are gathering information, transcribing parish registers, photographing headstones, etc.

Findmypast released a Devon Banns collection this week which is now included in the OGI.

This week I have returned to the amazing resources at www.archive.org.  There are thousands of genealogical magazines and books from the 1800's.  One of these publications was the Sussex Archaeological Collections which was first published in 1847.  Each annual publication was often over 350 pages in length and a treasure trove of faschinating information.  The majority was about the architecture, history and people of Sussex but, sometimes, transcriptions of parish registers, church memorials or graveyards are included.  Many of these are uniquely found in this publication and the OGI now includes 2,978 links to items found at archive.org.  

Here is an example of a detailed survey of monuments in the parish church at Rye along with the headstones in the churchyard and the burying ground (two locations).  It may help to justify the hundreds of hours of reading and tens of thousands of pages I have reviewed (The current total is at least 65,000 pages just for Sussex so far!)

Additional items added this week include updates at the country pages of the ukbmd.org.uk site.  These are local transcriptions of civil registration which include, for marriages, the actual church or registry office.  As you may know, the data at FreeBMD only tells you the district of the event so knowing the exact church of a marriage can help you locate the original record on the parish registers (use OGI to find the available records online!)

The Lincolnshire Parish Register collection at familysearch continues to be added to the OGI (their collection has no browse option) so there are now just over 200 places to check before it is completely represented.  

I look forward to discovering more useful resources to help you locate your ancestors and will continue to update you here when collections are added to the Online Genealogical Index.

Thank you for your use of the site!

Tim Manners
Creator and Owner of the OGI
http://ogindex.org

Over 700 new data sets added this week!

I hope you are having a successful and healthy 2018.

This weeks additions include more parishes from Lincolnshire, Findmypast collections from Durham, Northumberland and Yorkshire, more cemeteries from gravestonephotos.com and parish records from the Dorset Onlne Parish Clerk website.  The latter is an excellent example of the great contribution that volunteer transcribers can give to the community.

This weeks panic was my discovery that Genuki had changed their URL structure meaning that my 1200+ Genuki links were in danger of not working.  I had to manually review each one and update many to keep them working.  Genuki has a large collection of publically donated parish records and is a good resource for free information.

I am now down to 300 Lincolnshire parishes to review and add to the OGI so that should be coming to an end in February.

We are having a lot more interest and use of the site which pleases me to know that my project may be helping others all over the world to track down online records of their ancestors.  Currently, about 10 people are leaving their names and emails and becoming a "friend" of the OGI.

If you have not yet read the article about the General Register Office, I highly recommend it as the tips and step-by-step instructions will help you track down more ancestors using freely available resources.  You can find the article by clicking here.

I wish you all a good week and will continue looking for new resources to help us all.

Kind regards,

Tim Manners
http://ogindex.org