35,000+ land owner and occupier records for Hillingdon and Harrow released

With a new release of the records of over 35,000 individuals by TheGenealogist, family historians can now discover valuable particulars about ancestors’ homes from the following parts of London in 1910: Cowley, Cranford (Bedfont), Great Stanmore, Harefield, Harlington,

Harmondsworth, Harrow, Harrow Weald Hayes, Hillingdon East, Hillingdon West, Ickenham, Little Stanmore, Pinner, Ruislip, Uxbridge, West Drayton, Yiewsley and Wealdstone.

These latest residential records have been linked to detailed OS maps which allows the researcher to pinpoint an ancestor’s property on maps that go down to plot level. These land tax records were originally collected by the Inland Revenue’s Valuation Office and are sourced from

The National Archives IR58 records. Searchable by name or keywords using TheGenealogist’s Master Search, or by selecting a pin from the map displayed inside the powerful Map Explorer,

this tool allows family historians the ability to switch between georeferenced modern and historic maps and so to gain a better understanding of the neighbourhood in which ancestors from 1910 had lived or worked and to see how it may have changed in the intervening period. With contemporary maps you can see where the nearest churches, public houses and railway stations to your forebears’ homes were, along with other places that may have featured in your ancestors’ daily life in the area.

Read TheGenealogist’s article on these records here .

Can you help find heroine’s family?

Cotswold Wildlife Park in Oxfordshire is looking for help in tracing the family of World War Two heroine Iris Bower.

Iris Bower became one of the first women to set foot on the D-Day beaches and was the first British woman on active service to be flown into a war zone. She was later awarded an MBE for her work. She helped thousands of soldiers in British Field hospitals, saving countless lives. Iris ‘Fluffy’ Bowers, who died aged 90 in 2005, remains one of the service’s most distinguished heroines.

Forty-four years ago Cotswold Wildlife Park held a ceremony (pictured) in which Cotswold Radar RAF adopted a red panda named Radar. This year, in an echo of that ceremony, members of the tactical medical wing from RAF Brize Norton named two new red panda cubs, giving one of them the name Iris in the heroine’s honour.

Now the park is looking to track down Iris’s family for a special adoption event. Cotswold Wildlife Park has a long association with the armed forces, with its founder, John Heyworth, having been in the army, and in WW2 the site had formed Bradwell Grove Hospital.

If you can help connect the park to Iris’s family, please contact [email protected].