UK Timeline for family historians

by. Angela Smith & Neil Bertram

This guide is a timeline of genealogical resources: what records may be available and when they started. It also contains an aide memoire for all those historical dates we forget - which will help put family ancestors into an historical context. Coverage is from 1066 to 2011.

So, this handbook has been compiled as a tool for the family historian and in particular those new to genealogy or whose knowledge (or memory) of dates is shaky. It is not meant to be an exhaustive list of historical events. Rather, this timeline offers a guide for family historians to refer to and to help set dates into a wider historical context. It is selective; we have included items that we think are particularly important for family historians to know but there are many more that have not been cited. We have, for example, numerous references to the various taxes that have been imposed down the centuries since the paper trail for their collection might name your ancestor. There are many additional taxes that could be included - a tax on wallpaper for example in 1712 and another on the use of bricks in 1784, for which some records survive.