Unlock the Past

Unlock the Past has organised a number of special events since early 2010. Here we combine a review of these with the feedback from our recent Unlock the Past Major Events Survey to give you an overview of how they have gone and what we may consider in future. A copy of this blog can also be downloaded as a PDF file. This post is fairly long.

Here are the results of our 29th Unlock the Past poll - What English counties do you have ancestors from - or research interests in? Votes were cast by 383 people. The results are summarised in the table below.

There are several non-English locations listed (e.g.

Here are the results of our 27th Unlock the Past poll - What Scottish counties do you have ancestors from - or research interests in? Votes were cast by 443 people. The results are summarised in the table below.

Almost everyone responding to the poll had Scottish ancestry - just 2.5% did not (very similar to the Irish poll result). The most common countries were Ayrshire, Lanarkshire and Midlothian with over 20% of the voters indicating they have research interests in those counties.

Here are the results of our 25th Unlock the Past poll - What wars did your ancestors or others on your family tree serve in? Votes were cast by 298 people. The results are summarised in the table below.

Almost all voters have someone in the family who served in the first and second world wars and close to 40 percent had a connection with the Boer war. Families continue to be linked with more recent wars as indicated by the numbers for the Korean (10.9%), Vietnam (23.4%) and other recent conflicts.

Here are a few photos and comments on the History & Genealogy Roadshow ANZ to complement Shauna Hicks’ superb and interesting daily blogs and her Roadshow overview.

It was especially