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Archaeology Data Service | https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/ | |
Atlas of Hillforts in Great Britain and Ireland | https://hillforts.arch.ox.ac.uk/ | Includes 4,147 sites across England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland (1,224 in England). For each site details of archaeological investigation, secondary literature (including early editions of the VCH, with correct page references) are provided. |
British Association for Local History (BALH) including their journal The Local Historian | https://www.balh.org.uk/ The Local Historian https://www.balh.org.uk/thelocalhistorian | Back issues of their excellent journal, The Local Historian, temporarily available for free online. They also publish a [printed] guide to internet sources for local historians. |
British History Online | https://www.british-history.ac.uk/ | Entire content free to all users to 30 September 2020. |
The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure | https://www.campop.geog.cam.ac.uk/ | Population research, techniques and datasets. |
Churchwardens' Accounts of England and Wales | https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/myparish/projects/cwa/ | A searchable national database of all surviving churchwardens' accounts in England and Wales from the earliest known sets (c.1300) to c.1850. |
Commercial Motor Magazine Archive | http://archive.commercialmotor.com/ | A useful free resource providing detail of the road transport industry both passenger and freight. |
From Great War to Race Riots | https://www.greatwar-to-raceriots.co.uk/ | Digital project investigating the race riots of 1919 and the murder of Charles Wootton. Includes a digital archive of selected documents. |
GENUKI Reference Library | https://www.genuki.org.uk/ | GENUKI provides a virtual reference library of genealogical information of particular relevance to the UK and Ireland. |
Grace's Guide | http://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Main_Page | Grace’s Guide is a free-content not-for-profit project dedicated to publishing the history of industry in the UK and elsewhere. Includes trade journals. |
Historical Directories of England and Wales, 1760s-1910s | http://specialcollections.le.ac.uk/digital/collection/p16445coll4 | Digitised copies of selected directories held by the University of Leicester library. |
Industrial Heritage Online (IHO) | http://www.industrialhistoryonline.co.uk/yiho/index.php | The aim of IHO is to provide free web access to information about Industrial Heritage Sites. IHO is a fully searchable database, that has been developed by a group of Industrial History Societies, and which aims to provide an on-line repository for members' knowledge, photographs research notes, audio, and sound recording of industrial sites, artefacts and processes. It is hoped that, in time, this will become a comprehensive record of our shared Industrial Heritage and an invaluable resource to everyone researching the development of Industry. |
Integrated Census Microdata | http://icem.data-archive.ac.uk/ | This purpose-built system can be used to filter the database of over 180 million census records for censuses between 1851 and 1911 based on 20 key variables, then download the resulting data table of individual census records with 100+ variables per record. Note that the county breakdown is for the ‘census’ county and that some communities may not be in the county expected. Especially useful is the availability of occupation data, a great boon for work on economic and social history. |
Legacies of British Slave Ownership | https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/ | Includes data recording compensation paid to slave owners in Britain. |
Library of Rural and Agricultural Literature | https://www.bahs.org.uk/LIBRAL.html | Over 700 items. Password available on application. |
Magic Map (DEFRA) | http://magic.defra.gov.uk/MagicMap.aspx | DEFRA-produced map based on modern OS data with local authority boundaries, aerial photographs, landscape typology and land use. More accurate than Google mapping and can be printed out for use with fieldwork, etc. |
Medieval Genealogy | http://www.medievalgenealogy.org.uk/index.html | Does far more than the name suggests, including links to online sources, guides to what they contain and primary documents in translation. |
Making Britain: discover how South Asians shaped the nation, 1870-1950 | http://www.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/makingbritain/content/about-database | This online database provides information about South Asians in Britain from 1870 to 1950, the organizations they were involved in, their British connections, and the major events in which they participated. Designed as an interactive tool, it offers engaging and innovative search and browsing options, including a timeline, location maps, and network diagrams modelled on social networking sites which demonstrate South Asians' interactions and relationships in Britain at the time. Some entries have extracts from archival sources with explanation of their content and relevance. |
Railway Work, Life and Death project | http://www.railwayaccidents.port.ac.uk/ | Dataset and analysis of railway worker accidents in Britain and Ireland from the late 1880s to 1939. We’re providing data about who was involved, what they were doing on the railways, what happened to them and why. |
Society for all British and Irish Road Enthusiasts (SABRE) | http://www.sabre-roads.org.uk/ | Changes to roads and classifications of them assembled by SABRE are invaluable: useful Wiki with dates of construction, opening and closure with bypass schemes, junctions and other details. |
Trade Directories: Open Bibliography | https://www.zotero.org/groups/2337777/trade_directories | An open bibliography for anyone using trade and local directories in their research or teaching. It is a companion to the Historical Directories of England & Wales collection hosted by University of Leicester Special Collections Online (also included in this guide) |
A Vision of Britain through Time | www.visionofbritain.org.uk | Population and other statistic with boundaries of parishes and local government units. |
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Anti-Chinese articles from The Seaman | 27th June 1913 https://cdm21047.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/tav/id/5213 1st May 1914 https://cdm21047.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/tav/id/5087 27th May 1914 https://cdm21047.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/tav/id/5199 12th June 1914 https://cdm21047.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/tav/id/5093 | A series of racist articles directed at Chinese communities and workers published in the newspaper of the National Sailors' and Firemen's Union between 1913-1914. |
England’s Immigrants | https://www.englandsimmigrants.com/ | A fully-searchable database containing over 64,000 names of people known to have migrated to England during the period of the Hundred Years’ War and the Black Death, the Wars of the Roses and the Reformation. |
Extensive Urban Surveys (EUS) | https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archives/view/EUS/ | The Extensive Urban Surveys (EUS) project is part of a national programme of surveys of the archaeology, topography and historic buildings of England’s historic towns and cities, supported by English Heritage. |
Historic England National List | https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/ | Interrogate Historic England's database of designation and listing descriptions, along with crowdsourced images. |
Know Your Place West | http://www.kypwest.org.uk/ | Coverage of the counties of Somerset, Gloucestershire, Bristol, Wiltshire and Devon (and the unitary authorities in ‘CUBA’ – Counties that Used to Be Avon: North Somerset, Bath and North East Somerset and South Gloucestershire) including, for most of the area, georectified Tithe Maps, with overlays of OS and other mapping with information from various local authority and personal local history data interposed. |
Moving Here | https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.movinghere.org.uk/about/default.htm | Moving Here explores, records and illustrates why people came to England over the last 200 years and what their experiences were and continue to be. It offers free access, for personal and educational use, to an online catalogue of versions of original material related to migration history from local, regional and national archives, libraries and museums. (This project is archived but no longer maintained by the National Archives). |
Post-Windrush: African Caribbean migration between 1948-1957 | https://warwick.ac.uk/services/library/mrc/studying/docs/racism/windrush/ | Give access to six documents found in Warwick University Library. |
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National Library of Scotland Digital Resources | https://www.nls.uk/digital-resources | To access some resources you may need to join the NLS online. |
National Library of Scotland Maps | https://maps.nls.uk/ | Home of open access historic mapping from the Ordnance Survey and others with lots of interpretative tools. |
Scotland's People | https://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/ | Genealogical databases are free to search. Registration is required and there are fees to downloading digital copies of the documents themselves. |
Scottish Economic History Database, 1550-1780 | http://www.iisg.nl/hpw/scotland/index.php | Site provides data on Scottish economic history from 1550-1780 organised by crop yields, demographic data, price series, wage series and weather statistics. |
Scottish Post Office Directories | https://digital.nls.uk/directories/ | Over 700 digitised directories covering most of Scotland and dating from 1773 to 1911 are available here for you to use. |
The Scottish Register of Tartans | https://www.tartanregister.gov.uk/search | Register contains thousands of tartan designs that are free to access and can be searched by date, name, colours and keywords. Free to search without registering. |
The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, 1563-1736 | http://www.shca.ed.ac.uk/Research/witches/ | Database of the 4,000 known to be accused of witchcraft in Scotland. Includes and interactive database and supporting webpages. Provided by the University of Edinburgh. |
Women's History Scotland - Resources | http://womenshistoryscotland.org/resources/sources-for-womens-history/ | Resource List |
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The Blue Books of 1847 | https://www.library.wales/discover/digital-gallery/printed-material/the-blue-books-of-1847 | Series of reports conducted in the mid-nineteenth century on education in Wales. |
Cymru 1914: y Rhyfel byd Cyntaf a'r Profiad Cymreig | https://cymru1914.org/cy/home | This digital archive is the output of a large-scale digitization project. Here you will find a collection of primary sources from Welsh libraries and archives. The project provides a digital collection which reveals the hidden history of the First World War and shows how the history affected life, language and culture in Wales. The project has collected scattered and often inaccessible material in one place to create a unique digital archive of interest to researchers, students and the public in Wales and beyond. |
Davies, Walter. Board of Agriculture reports | https://www.library.wales/discover/digital-gallery/printed-material/gwallter-mechains-reports-for-the-board-of-agriculture | Three digitised volumes of the agricultural reports produced by Walter Davies in the early nineteenth century. |
Dictionary of Welsh Biography | https://biography.wales/ | This website contains over five thousand concise biographies of individuals who have made a significant contribution to national life, whether in Wales or more widely. |
GPM Gogledd Cymru=North Wales BMD | http://www.northwalesbmd.org.uk/ | Searchable database of births, marriages and deaths from the nineteenth century. |
Welsh Almanac Collection | https://www.llgc.org.uk/?id=7379 | Gives access to digitial copies of Welsh alamanacs from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. |
Welsh Journals Online | https://journals.library.wales/ | Welsh Journals provides access to journals relating to Wales published between 1735-2007. Titles range from academic and scientific publications to literary and popular magazines. |
Welsh Newspapers Online | https://newspapers.library.wales/ | Welsh Newspapers Online is a free online resource from the National Library of Wales where you can discover millions of articles from the Library’s rich collection of historical newspapers. |
Welsh Tithe Maps | https://places.library.wales/ | Search and browse over 300,000 entries and their accompanying apportionment documents using original and present-day maps. |