findmypast.com adds newspaper and ancient parish records

I haven't written about any additions to the large online genealogy database programs for a while. Since the new records are added online regularly, I simply suggest that if you are interested, you check back periodically to see what new records have gone online. The announcements from findmypast.com did catch my attention however.

The first one was a post entitled, "Over half a million English baptism records dating back to 1530 available." This was interesting for two reasons, the number of records and the dates of the records. Here is the explanation from the post;

Records predating normal English parish collections 

Spanning the years 1530 to 1886, the 580,361 baptism records now available comprise transcripts of the registers from over 150 Wiltshire parishes compiled by Wiltshire Family History Society. 

The Wiltshire baptisms are very unusual, as some of the earliest records in the collection are 484 years old, predating the vast majority of English parish records.

This short note gives you a very good idea of the absolute limit of the English records about individuals outside of royalty and other very important people. This is further explained by the announcement as follows:

The records begin in 1530, eight years before the Vicar General of England, Thomas Cromwell, ordered all of the nation’s parish churches to keep a record of all baptisms, marriages and burials.

If you are researching back into the 1600s or even earlier, you need to make absolutely sure you are not searching for a chimera. Before searching again and again, you might want to take time to establish the dates of the oldest records available in any given record category. 

The second article that caught my eye is entitled, "Time for another newspaper roundup… nearly a quarter of a million pages added from 1752-1954." I was interested in this because of my recent never-ending project to list a link to all the digital newspaper websites in the U.S. by state. The article explains, simply, "We’ve added nearly a quarter of a million new newspaper pages to our collection, so you’ll have plenty of articles to peruse this month." The list of newspapers added and the years of the additions are listed in the article.