Visitations and Pedigrees

As part of a series examining family history resources for beginners, librarian Antony Ramm explores Visitation records – a largely neglected but extremely worthwhile set of genealogy records from the 16th and 17th-centuries… Family historians will be familiar with the difficulty of tracing ancestries prior to the almost-simultaneous start of Civil Registration and Census records in the…

Burial Records – An Introduction

  The article below was originally published in 2017. It has been lightly-edited to fit our 2020 series exploring family history resources for beginners.  This Saturday 25 March, our Local and Family History department will have a stall at the Be Curious festival at the University of Leeds. We were kindly invited by the Brotherton Library’s Special…

Owney Madden

Friday the 24th of April 2015 marked the 50th-anniversary of Owney Madden’s death. Owney – sometimes Owen – Madden was a legendary figure in American organised crime; a notorious bootlegger during the Roaring Twenties; an associate of Dutch Schultz and Lucky Luciano; the owner of the fabled Cotton Club; a childhood friend to actor George…