The first national database of burial sites in England and Wales will be created thanks to a £586,700 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund.
The grant was given to Caring for God’s Acre, a non-religious charity focused on preserving and celebrating burial grounds, to fund the Beautiful Burial Ground Project.
Caring for God’s Acre described one of the purposes of the four-year project as to “Create a bespoke database with interactive map where individual burial sites can be mapped, linking biological records to a particular site, easily accessed by all and linked to other national heritage databases”.
In addition, it will encourage citizen science and historic and cultural recording of both graveyards and the wildlife they contain.
Thousands of British and Irish census, birth, marriage and death records are available for free on Findmypast for the next week to mark the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage.
The archive of the Oldham Evening Chronicle, which faced an uncertain future after the newspaper closed, will be preserved after it passed into public ownership.
The newspaper opened in 1854 and continued publishing as an independent paper until its last issue in August 2017.
Jean Stretton, leader of Oldham Council, hailed the “brilliant news”, saying: “It would have been a tragedy for this important collection to have been lost to future generations”.
The archive of newspaper cuttings and images, which is 25.35 cubic metres in size, will be held in temporary storage before being made available for public use after the collections store at the new Oldham Heritage and Arts centre opens in late 2019-early 2020.
MyHeritage DNA test users are now allowed to contact matches without subscribing to the website.
The Contacting DNA matches feature, which lets potential relatives message each other, remains free for users who uploaded DNA data to the website and is now free for those who don’t have a subscription plan.
In a blog post, MyHeritage said: “We are making this free because this has been a frequent request by our users.
The People’s History Museum in Manchester is inviting members of the public to submit entries to a new exhibition exploring the impact of the 1918 Representation of the People Act, which granted the right to vote to all men and some women.
Participants are invited to submit an object, photograph, artwork, memento, banner or piece of campaign material from the past or present that depicts their story of representation, or that of their family.
A selection of submissions will be included in ‘Represent! Voices 100 Years On’, a feminist zine-style exhibition which opens on 2 June.
To find out more, email represent@phm.org.uk.