History and Today

Here is a small extract of Lees Street, off Oldham Road, St George's District, Manchester, on the 1849 town plan and data from the 1851 census. Green houses = born in Ireland pink houses = born in Manchester Lees Street, Manchester, 1851 census

I'm back working on procession routes in the early 19th century. Here is a sneak peek of a typology I'm building, but I'll leave you guessing as to the towns mapped:

Layering old maps on Google Earth with the 3D buildings option on. Here's Park Hill, Sheffield, on a 1823 map

Ever come across archives and manuscripts for sale on Ebay or other auction sites and thought, 'that should be publicly accessible to everyone rather than being sold privately and never seen again?' I've set up a database of interesting items for sale which might become useful for historical research. It's: http://archivesonebay.omeka.net/ http://archivesonebay.omeka.net/ I keep an eye out for anything interesting relating to my own research, and have realised that sellers and dealers on ebay have done us researchers a service - essentially digitising a whole load of archives that are unavailable publicly. So this site will hopefully help to collate a small fraction of them for future use. I hope it will also mitigate against that impression researchers sometimes get when they've 'finished' looking through an archive at a record office or local studies library, and think that they've seen everything relating to a particular place or topic. O

The Chartists.org website has published some great photos of Newport Chartist Convention, which took place on 5 November 2016. It was a lovely day, with an inspiring set of speakers and activists, and wonderful to see the John Frost School with their choir singing Chartist songs. Thanks to the Head of the school, who made us all very welcome.