Fire and plague hit the web

Details of deaths from the bubonic plague and the Great War Fire of London are among 18 million parish records now published online.

Ancestry.co.uk's archive, launched in partnership with the City of London's London Metropolitan Archives and Guildhall Library Manuscripts, claims to be the most comprehensive collection of parish records available online.

Other events covered in the archive, which spans London's history from 1538 to 1980, include the bombing of the capital in the Blitz during 1940-41 and the cholera outbreak of 1854.

One hundred thousand people, almost 20 per cent of London's population at the time, died from the bubonic plague between 1665 and 1666. Officials sometimes marked the burial records with 'plague' or simply the letter 'P', which can be seen in the scans of the original documents on the Ancestry site.

Other noteworthy entries in the parish records include the baptism of Samuel Pepys as well as the marriage records of Oscar Wilde and Thomas Hardy. Charles Dickens, John Keats and Michael Faraday can also be found in the archive.

Ancestry.co.uk costs 10.95 per month to access or 83.40 for a year's membership.

www.ancestry.co.uk/lma

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