Manchester records to be digitised

In a two-year project, around eight million Manchester records are to be digitised and made available online for the first time.

Findmypast.co.uk, the UK family history website, has been awarded the contract by Manchester Archives to digitise cemetery registers plus institutional (gaol, school, workhouse) records of Manchester, and will work with FamilySearch International, the world’s largest repository of genealogical records, to make them fully searchable online for the very first time.

Findmypast.co.uk and FamilySearch will be digitising an estimated 130,000 images and 8,000,000 records over the next two years. The records will cover all of Manchester and some parts of Lancashire, due to boundary movement over the centuries. The records will include entries going back to the sixteenth century. In the collection being released, the 19th century prison registers of the area will also be made available.

Every record from cemetery registers and institutional (gaol, school, workhouse) records of Manchester will be available free at any City of Manchester library. The records available will include:

• Manchester Overseers of the Poor Apprenticeship Indentures;
• Giles Shaw transcripts for parish registers including Oldham St. Mary: Baptisms 1662-1796; Marriages 1662-1816; Burials 1662-1826;
• Private cemeteries (now closed);
• Ardwick Cemetery: burial registers, 1838-1950;
• Rusholme Road Cemetery: burial registers, 1821-1933;
• Cheetham Hill Wesleyan Cemetery: burial registers, 1815-1968;
• Withington Workhouse: Creed registers 1869-1898, birth registers 1857-1911, death registers 1857-1949;
• Withington Workhouse: Creed registers 1898-1911;
• Withington Workhouse: Interment Registers 1898-1915;
• Withington Workhouse: admission registers;
• Manchester Workhouse, New Bridge Street, 1881-1899;
• Manchester Workhouse, New Bridge Street, Creed Registers 1900-1911;
• Manchester Industrial Schools: admission registers 1866-1912;
• Manchester Schools: admission registers c.1870-1915;
• 19th cent. prison registers.

FamilySearch will scan original images of the registers for Findmypast.co.uk to then make available online at Findmypast.co.uk with an index search on FamilySearch.org.

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