National tithe record collection completed

Family historians can now search the complete National Tithe Record Collection for England and view their ancestors’ land and homes plotted through the ages on Victorian tithe maps, as well as on today’s modern street and satellite maps.

Users of TheGenealogist’s powerful Map Explorer, which has seen a number of records added in recent months, will now also benefit from the inclusion of tithe maps and records for five extra counties of England. With Gloucestershire, Hampshire, Herefordshire, Nottinghamshire and Sussex joining previous releases, TheGenealogist now offers all of the English counties’ tithe records and maps for to its Diamond subscribers.

Tithe records cover the majority of the country and were created by the 1836 Tithe Commutation Act which required tithes in kind to be converted to monetary payments called tithe rentcharge. The tithe survey was established to find out which areas were subject to tithes, who owned them, who occupied the various parcels of land, the usage of the land, how much was payable and to whom and so generated these maps and apportionment books.

With Map Explorer researchers can pinpoint a record to the exact same coordinates on various historical and modern maps. Family and house historians are therefore able to see where an ancestor’s land plot was throughout the eras, even when the landscape has completely changed over the years.

• Total number of maps in this release is 1,310.
• Total pins on georeferenced plots added in this release is 673,352.
• Map Explorer now has a total number of 11,804 georeferenced tithe maps to view.
• 5,202,983 georeferenced parcels of tithable land are now on Map Explorer, indicated by map pins.

Tithes usefully record all levels of society from large estate owners to occupiers of small plots, such as a homestead or similar, as you can learn from the article Plotting A Victorian Farmer’s Home Over Time .

More than 100,000 land tax records go online

More than 109,000 new IR58 Valuation Office land tax records for owners and occupiers have been added by TheGenealogist to its Lloyd George Domesday Survey records.

Researchers can now discover all sorts of interesting details about the homes of their ancestors from the Lewisham and Bromley areas. Diamond subscribers of

TheGenealogist can find what their forebears’ property was like in the years before WWI using the scanned images of the field books. These documents reveal what the surveyor from the years between 1910 and 1915 recorded about the size, state of repair and value of the house.

As all the records are linked to the large scale Ordnance Survey maps that were used at the time, each property is shown plotted on detailed mapping on TheGenealogist’s Map Explorer. This exceptionally useful tool, with its ability to show the same point on a variety of modern and historical maps, allows the house or family historian to see how the area may have changed over time and to explore their ancestors’ locality.

Read TheGenealogist’s article From a Crystal Palace to the home of a Lord Mayor embroiled in scandal .