London Lives

[Tracey]

Useful and interesting site that may be of use to some...........

London Lives, an online archive containing 240,000 manuscripts and printed pages, published between 1690 and 1800, goes public, providing an invaluable insight into the lives of millions of ordinary people during a momentous century that saw revolution in France, the development of the steam engine and American independence from Britain.

The five-year project, which has involved the digitising of eight London archives, features a rich variety of documents previously all but inaccessible to the public. Among them are workhouse records, criminal registers, coroners' reports, court orders and papers governing the dispensation of poor relief.

Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, and produced by the universities of Sheffield and Hertfordshire, the site allows both amateur and professional historians to search the archives for individuals.


http://www.londonlives.org/

[Russell]

Hi Tracey

That looks a great resource. This is one of the few times I wish I had at least one English relative.

Hold on a sec - my wife has the daughter of William Pitts who was a silver chaser in London. Maybe there is something there about him

Time to go on another search

Russell

[Tracey]

None of mine went to live / work in London until the early 1900's - a lot of the good resourses seem to skip me and mine ! although i cant complain about the LMA on Anc.......

[SarahND]

Looks very cool! I, too, am scrambling trying to find someone who was there at the time I have one who was there in 1822... just too late!

Cheers,
Sarah

[trish1]

I have been searching for some details of my husbands convict ancestor who supposedly was in the Scots Guards - in London - c. 1770s-1780s. It did find him but only the Old Bailey trial documents which have their own website. His Australian relatives invented an imaginary genealogy for him in the late 1800s - and interestingly, a man with the same name as the legendary ancestor appears in a bastardy exam in 1776. It seems it would be very useful for anyone searching for unknown fathers. Much detail of the girl and the supposed father of the child.

Trish