Manx National Heritage is now providing free online access to the family history website ancestry.com.
The Manx charity has signed an agreement with Ancestry which will see the Ancestry Institution offer access at the Manx National Heritage Library and Archives which are based at the Manx Museum in Douglas.
Ancestry is pleased to empower visitors to the Manx Museum to delve in to their family history with Ancestry Institution comprising more than 60 billion searchable records from 88 countries around the world, including census records, civil birth, marriage and death records, parish records, migration records, military records, directories, photos and more.
As well as holding collections for the Isle of Man and the United Kingdom, the Ancestry Institution offers extensive online access to collections from the United States of America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and across Europe, enabling researchers to trace their own roots to other countries or to follow the paths of ancestors who may have emigrated.
With ongoing updates and new content regularly being added, users can keep coming back to discover more. Ancestry is excited at the prospects of adding the Isle of Man Parish registers to its platform in 2026, through its new relationship with Manx National Heritage at the Manx Museum.
In the meantime, there are plenty of exciting collections for users to delve in to. Popular and recently added collections include:
- 1921 Isle of Man Census
- 1921 England, Wales and Channel Islands Census
- British Army, World War II Medal Cards, 1939-1945
- British Army, World War I Service Records, 1914-1920
- Church of England Parish Registers, 1538 – 1925
- UK and Ireland Outward and Incoming Passenger lists, 1878-1960
- Registers of Habitual Criminals and Police Gazettes, 1834-1934
- Obituary and Marriage notices from millions of Newspapers, 1800’s-current
US, Canadian, UK and other international collections, Multimedia collections, plus an intuitive search interface, detailed search indexes and helpful Learning Centre tools of Charts and Forms to organise your research, makes Ancestry Institution an indispensable free resource for any visitor to the Manx Museum.
Sarah Christian, MNH Library and Archives Assistant, said:
“We enjoy welcoming homecomers from all over the world, especially in the summer, as they explore our beautiful Island, looking for their Manx roots and the places their ancestors lived worked and died. Having access to Ancestry ® will be a boon to our regular users too and we look forward to some metaphorical ‘brick walls’ being broken down.”
The Manx Museum Library and Archives in Douglas (open Wednesday-Saturday 10am-4:30pm) offers visitors a drop-in facility for anyone keen to uncover their Manx family history and other aspects of the Isle of Man’s past. Whether you’re new to uncovering your roots or a seasoned researcher, the MNH team in the Library and Archives will get you setup using the online resources and, of course, the collections.
Isle of Man Family History Society chair, Maggie Mulhern, added:
“We are delighted to have free access to the 1921 census in the Manx National Heritage Library and Archives. Although many of our members know the whereabouts of these near relatives, each new document helps add colour to our family stories.”
Whatever you can discover using the worldwide family history resources on Ancestry, alongside the Manx National Heritage collections on imuseum.im, Sarah has been having fun exploring just a few stories.
“In the MNH Photographic Archive and digitised on imuseum.im are early 20th century photographs of an American drugstore belonging to John Henry Quine. For us to have these photographs means he must be linked to the Isle of Man, but searching Ancestry, we discovered census enumerators in the US declare his birth country as England.
“Only one record from the American 1910 census has ‘Isle of Man’, but it’s crossed out. This illustrates how even if your family story connects you to the Isle of Man, the documents don’t always make it easy. Further research using Ancestry reveals that indeed John Quine’s family came from Douglas with the 1881 census recording that he lived at 5 Derby Road before emigrating to America.
“Next we explored a photograph of a portrait painting of William Corlett of Ohio, USA, on the Manx National Heritage imuseum.im website. A search for William Corlett on Ancestry led us not only to William appearing on the North American 1860 census but on the next page a whole community of Manx farmers living and working in Newburgh, Cuyahoga, Ohio. As a common name, there is another William Corlett nearby at Warrensville,” Sarah added.
ENDS