Ancestry | Online learning opportunities brought to you by LogintoLearn
A lot of people like to know the history of their family, but how and where to start can be daunting. There are lots of fantastic online resources to give you a starting place.
Ancestry
Access to Ancestry through our LogintoLearn team.
Staff-Assisted Research
Normally you would be able to access Ancestry from the PCs in your local library and support from our Open Learning Officers with using the website. While our libraries are closed our Open Learning Officers have limited access to Ancestry. If you have a particular document that you need retrieved or checked please contact them via logintolearn@culturenl.co.uk with details of the document and your library card number. Please note that any research/queries are limited to 30 minutes. Alternatively please contact our colleagues at North Lanarkshire Heritage Centre on heritagecentre@culturenl.co.uk – more details about their collection can be found here.
Access to North Lanarkshire Collections
We are now able to provide free online access for anyone wishing to search the digitised North Lanarkshire collections on Ancestry. Click on the link below and you will be taken to a search page where you can enter a name to search for. In order to see the full search results you will be asked to create a free registered guest account with Ancestry by providing an email address and password and accepting the terms and conditions of the website. After this step you will be able to view the search results for the North Lanarkshire collections free of charge.
Please note – the free access via this link works only for the North Lanarkshire collections. If you search other collections you may hit a paywall.
To access visit: http://www.ancestry.co.uk/s107954/t43608/rd.ashx
Other Family History Resources
Ancestry isn’t the only place to help with researching family history online. Here is a list of other resources that you can use in your research.
Family Search
The Family Search website contains genealogical information that has been collected by the Church of Latter Day Saints. This can be a helpful starting point.
Scottish Mining
The Scottish Mining website contains a lot of information on the mining community, details of mining accidents, details of housing conditions and other historical documents.
National Library of Scotland Maps
The National Library of Scotland website has a maps section. You can use the side by side option to see two maps – one old and the other as an aerial view of the present. Alternatively, the Geo-referenced option lets you lay one map on top of the other. This is a fantastic tool to see what your area was like in the past.
Billion Graves
This website is a family history project which encourages people to capture images of gravestones which might be useful to others researching their family history but not able to visit a particular site themselves. While this isn’t the time to be going out capturing images, the images once pictures have been uploaded they require to be transcribed. This involves looking at the pictures of the headstones and filling in the information such as names and dates of birth onto a form on the screen. There are good help screens too to guide you through the process. On the website, you’ll find the section for doing this under Volunteer. You can skip photographs that aren’t clear enough.
British Pathé
www.britishpathe.com – also available on YouTube
Browse and watch lots of the old British Pathé films – newsreels shown in cinemas reporting big news events but also ordinary life and hobbies. A great conversation starter perhaps?
SCRAN
SCRAN normally requires a paid subscription to access it, however the site is providing free access until the end of October 2020. The details on how to access this is on their homepage. SCRAN hosts over 400,000 amazing, fully-captioned images, sounds and film from over 300 museums, galleries and archives including V&A, National Galleries of Scotland, Glasgow Museums and The Scotsmans to name a few. SCRAN is a wonderful resource for local and family historians as it provides old pictures and detailed information on many places and topics.
National Library of Scotland
Another important resource is the National Library of Scotland. You can join the library online (all you need to join is an address in Scotland) and you will gain access to most of Find My Past – a family history site similar to Ancestry, the British Newspaper Database, their Scottish Screen Archive, interactive maps and many other wonderful digital resources.
Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is a vast database of databases which has so much material it will occupy anyone for a lifetime. It has many different types of material including books, films and music. According to their website, ‘The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of ‘universal access to knowledge”.
National Museums Scotland
The National Museums Scotland website contains many collections of interest including ‘Ancient Egyptian Collection’, ‘Made in Scotland, Changing the World’, and the ‘Scottish Life Archive’. The Scottish Life Archive collects, records and preserves evidence of Scotland’s material culture and social history.
Memento-Mori
Memento-Mori is a website that provides a record of the gravestones and their monumental inscriptions contained in many of Scotland’s cemetereies. Indexes are available for these cemeteries and the research carried out by volunteers can be downloaded as PDF files. They provide a valuable source of information for family historians.
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