If you’ve ever wanted to know how far back you can trace your Yorkshire lineage, you’re in luck!
More than 5.4 million Yorkshire records dating from 1538 to 1990 have been released online.
UK family history website findmypast.co.uk has collaborated with the Yorkshire Digitisation Consortium to complete its Yorkshire Collection, a rich archive of more than 10.5 million records showing original handwritten registers held by six Yorkshire archives.
The completed project, started in October 2014, now includes parish baptisms, banns, marriages, burials, school records and university records.
It’s now billed as the largest online repository of Yorkshire family history records anywhere in the world.
Fully searchable transcripts of each original document are also included, enabling anyone to go online and search for their Yorkshire ancestors by name, location and date.
The youngest member of the Bronte literary family, Anne Bronte, can be found in the burial registers for St Mary’s parish church in Scarborough. While the rest of her siblings were buried in the family vault in Howarth on the Yorkshire moors, Anne chose to “lay the flower where it had fallen” and was laid to rest in St Mary’s churchyard, beneath the castle walls, overlooking the bay.
Debra Chatfield, a family historian at findmypast, said: “The Yorkshire Collection is one of the largest regional parish record collections available anywhere online and contains some truly wonderful gems. Now that this landmark collection is complete, records for the whole county are available to search in one place, enabling people all around the world to discover fascinating details of Yorkshire ancestors they didn’t know they had in this historical goldmine.”
