Articles by Findmypast

Have you ever wondered what your surname says about you and your family history?  Tracing the history of the surnames in your family tree is one of the most popular ways of researching your ancestors. Surnames can take you back centuries. They can evolve, shaped by culture, work, language, migration, and more.  A comprehensive study by Findmypast has uncovered the evolving landscape of English surnames dating back to the time of Henry VIII, shedding light on forgotten lineages, regional dialects,

Alexander Armstrong is a comedian and actor, perhaps best known as the host of the BBC quiz show Pointless alongside Richard Osman. He's half of the comedy duo Armstrong and Miller (alongside long-time friend Ben Miller), and also presents a morning show on Classic FM. This multi-talented personality boasts a long and diverse career which includes radio, appearing regularly on Have I Got News For You, and voice acting credits on Danger Mouse, Sarah Jane Adventures and more.He married

Whether you've got relatives who fought in World War 1, World War 2 or another global conflict, it's so important to honour their stories with acts of remembrance. More than just wearing a poppy each Remembrance Sunday, this means preserving their stories for generations to come. Using our record collection, learn more about the servicemen who were captured as prisoners of war (POWs) between 1914 and 1918.Although France had always been Britain’s traditional enemy, not Germany, by August 1914, as a result of the

Between coronations, weddings, royal babies and Jubilees, there's been no shortage of royal occasions. The late Queen Elizabeth II celebrated her Platinum Jubilee in June of 2022, just three months before her passing on 8 September.Take a look at some of the ways our community celebrated the longest-reigning monarch in British history.Commemorating the coronationBob Avery, in Chepstow, sent in this lovely photo taken on 2 June 1953 - the coronation date for Queen Elizabeth II.Bob's uncle took this photo just a

In 2011, we set out to digitise the British Library's entire newspaper collection and open it to the public as the British Newspaper Archive online. Today, we're proud to announce that we've passed the 100 million pages milestone. But we're not stopping there.Search for stories in our newspapers and publicationsExplore millions of digitised pages of newspapers and other publications from our British and Irish collections, dating as far back as the 1700s.Our newspaper digitisation continues at pace, and soon

If you’re Catholic or you have potential Catholic ancestors, keep reading. After all, Latin isn’t a dead language. It’s just Roman around.And don’t worry, we won’t ask you to conjugate a verb.While Latin is no longer a spoken language today, it survives in countless archives and libraries in many countries. Whether you were subjected to a spot of Latin at school or not, any genealogist needs to know the basics of Latin in family history records to research

The 1921 Census of England & Wales is a detailed snapshot of 38 million lives that reveals where your relatives were, what they were doing and who they were with on one summer night in 1921.We want to help you make the most of this once-in-a-generation opportunity to explore your past. So we've created an interactive checklist to help make sure you're geared up to get the best from it. Covering everything from where to start to how to dig deeper, this is

By the time of the 1921 Census, Britain was a nation still recovering from the First World War (1914-18) and the global Spanish flu pandemic (1918-20). Millions of lives had been lost in those tragedies. The families and communities left behind were still picking up the pieces. Yet, life-changing progress was also happening around them to help them move forward in a world changed forever.The 1921 Census is available online exclusively at Findmypast, and you can get full access through our Premium subscription.

Census records are the perfect way to tell the story of what your family looked like in times gone by. They reveal what your ancestors were doing and give us clues to where they may be found in other family records. Findmypast has a huge collection of these kinds of documents, and as any good genealogist will tell you, getting to grips with them can unlock a whole new world of family history discovery. Here are a few top tips

If you ever focus your family research in a particular place – a town, a county, an island – you soon learn to recognise those surnames which are typical of the place. This might be because they either occur frequently or stand out as unusual, or often, in the cases of local names, both.Good examples are the surnames Camburn and Edenden in Whitstable, Kent, Bolitho in parts of Cornwall, Docwra in Cumberland, Quayle on the Isle of Man and Linklater in