Family and local history

The National Library of Scotland has just released digital copies of British military lists from the First and Second World Wars. They list all the officers who served in the British Army, the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force from 1914-1918 and 1939-1945. They can be viewed for free on the library website.

The library’s newest web feature has gone live. The digitised Scottish Post Office directories for 1773 to 1911 is now fully searchable. You can search by place, name and year, as well as viewing complete books in PDF format. The original adverts from these directories have also been digitised, including this image from the 1905 Glasgow Post Office Directory.

There is also a really interesting ‘Did you know’ feature, which provides information on subjects as diverse as shipping, telephones and dentistry.

My colleague, Lorna Black, had a recent enquiry where someone was looking for Glasgow telephone books from the 1970’s. Although we do hold Scottish telephone books, our holdings are incomplete and some of the years that the enquirer wanted were missing. On further investigation, she found that British Telecom have a centre for their archives which includes a nearly complete set of phone books for the whole of the United Kingdom. Further information on accessing this collection can be found on their website at http://www.btplc.com/thegroup/btshistory/btgrouparchives/.

Three men in working clothes around 1870

If you’re interested in family history then we run a monthly Readers’ Workshop’ called ‘Discovering family history’, where you can find out about the resources we hold to help you with your family research. These include directories, gravestone inscriptions, newspapers and census records, to name just a few of the categories covered in the workshop which are useful for family history research.

The workshop also includes some practical information on using the Library for those that are new to our services. It’s run at a different time each month and you can find out more information, including booking details, at Readers’ Workshops.

Do come along, the workshops are open to everyone and they’re free!