Added the What's New page you are currently viewing
Enabled wildcard searching on non-advanced searches (for both genealogical and maritime sides of the database)
Added charting and graphing of data. (NB: The data currently available for filtering/graphing, while accurate, are intended primarily as a demonstration. More data, as well as more analytically useful groupings of existing data, will be made available in future)
Exposed cleaned up and standardised occupations for more accurate search results
Rewritten search code should result in most searches completing much faster than previous versions of the site
Bug Fix - December 22nd
Fixed bug where extremely broad multi-term wildcard searches would take an unreasonable amount of time to complete
February 2015
Calculated more informative short record headings. Instead of saying simply "Baptised Their Child," for instance, a record might say "Baptised His Daughter, Ellen Keene"
Added hyperlinking from within individual record results
Bug Fix - February 24th
Fixed bug where certain ship register related records were not displaying
December 2015
Added Treemapping capability to website. Currently, only a single dataset (probate valuations by occupation) is available. Others will be added as data becomes available
Added basic downloading functionality to geneaological side of website. Now lists of short results (as returned from searches) can be downloaded for later reference, as can the contents of individual record pages. The download format is tab-separated text files (.tab) which can be easily imported into any spreadsheet or database package
March 2016
Website server code migrated to PHP 7.0, resulting in noticeable improvements in search speed and overall responsiveness
Bug Fix - October 2017
Fixed a bug where the searches between any two given years were taking far longer than they should
December 2017
Major new data addition to the site. Post 1860 data which was out of the project's 1700-1850 scope but was uploaded primarily for load testing during development has now been removed and replaced with new data from 1700-1860. This new data fills in some missing records for key Liverpool Central parishes (particularly marriages and baptisms from St. Peter) as well as adding new records from the following parishes: Everton, Walton on the Hill, Woolton, Kirkdale, Edge Hill and Toxteth Park.
March 2018
Cleaned and standardised all Parish strings in order to produce cleaner and more consistent search results. Previously there were minor variations in how the parish in which a record was generated was captured (e.g., "St Peter, Liverpool, Lancashire" vs "St Peters, Liverpool, Lancashire"). These have now been standardised, making searching entirely by parish a far more reliable proposition.
May 2018
Added searchable Ancestry field to both Basic and Advanced genealogical searches. Currently this field is only populated for a few people known to be either African or Jewish, but these lists will be expanded in future as well as new categories added.
Added a searchable variable for known Adult Baptisms to Advanced genealogical searches. This is useful as adult baptisms were often religious conversions or the baptising of enslaved persons and so may be of particular interest to historians.
June 2018
Added 18,738 new individual life event records derived from 3088 St. Peters Baptism records from 1836 and 2623 St. Brides Marriage records from 1845-1860.
August 2019
Complete ground-up rewrite of querying code which should drastically improve the speed and reliability of all user searches.
Coming Soon
Atomisation of abode information to allow for more precise searching
Improved HISCO coding for existing occupation information
November 2019
Additional refinement of querying code which should further improve the speed and reliability of all user searches.
Rewritten table code for cleaner output of results