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