On 11th March a major new update to the Name Search facility was launched on the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) website.

If you’re having trouble finding an old place or street in Queensland then this new web page by Kerry Raymond will be of interest.

Release of the 1911 Census

The 1911 census will be available by 11:00 BST on Tuesday 5 April. Images of the enumeration books will be in full colour and for the first time the enumeration includes the particulars of the marriage, the number of children born from the marriage, the industry or service connected to the occupation and the nationality of the person enumerated. We are also planning to make some scanned historic documents available at www.ScotlandsPeople.gov.uk, for example PDF's of the street index books for the main towns and cities of Scotland, which will show whether a street existed in 1911.

Extension of validity period for credits plus increase in cost of credits

We are pleased to announce that from 1 April 2011, any credits purchased will be valid for one year rather than 90 days. Remember that you do not lose any un-used credits when the period of validity has expired; when you buy more credits they will simply be added to your existing credits.

Remember also that from 1 April 2011 the cost of 30 credits will rise to £7 and the cost of an Extract will rise to £12. These changes have been necessary to help fund the flexibility and availability of our services as well as fund the cost of providing an Extract and were approved by the Scottish Parliament through the Registration Services (Fees) Amendment (Scotland) Regulations 2010. Please note that it will still cost 1 credit to view up to 25 index entries and 5 credits to view an image of the statutory or census records. It will also cost 5 credits to view images of the forthcoming 1911 census when it is released on 5 April 2011.

It was announced in January that the Society of Genealogists in London and leading family history website www.findmypast.co.uk have published online over 9 million records from the Society’s unrivalled collection.

Thanks to the Scottish Genes Blog (http://scottishancestry.blogspot.com/) for an update. 

The National Library of Scotland has a new dedicated Post Office Directories page on its website at www.nls.uk/family-history/directories/post-office. There are 287 directories currently available from 1774-1911. You currently can only browse or download the Directories but a full search function is expected in March 2011.

From the same blog: The 18,000 Scottish maps from the library's online collection have now been made available at the ScotlandsPlaces website at www.scotlandsplaces.gov.uk. ScotlandsPlaces is a website that lets users search across different national databases using geographic location. The user is able to enter a place name or a coordinate to search across these collections or they can use the maps to both refine and define their search.