Some archives are held by the Lancashire County Council Historic Environment Record (HER), but Parish Records can also be a valuable resource. Some areas also have Family History Centres, where you can visit and view comprehensive collections of material on local history, including electoral registers, historic Ordnance Survey maps, local trade directories and Census records. Some also contain Parish Records from Lancashire parishes, local newspapers, local newspaper indexes cuttings and local historic photograph collections.
1. Lancashire County Council: Historic Environment Record
The Historic Environment Record (HER) contains information on over 35,000 known sites across the county. This includes standing ruins, prehistoric and medieval earthworks, features identified on an aerial photograph and medieval pottery in fact any material remains of Lancashire's past. Historic landscape, townscape and buildings information is also held as well as aerial photographs and reports on archaeological fieldwork and building recording.
3. The Record Society Lancashire & Cheshire
The Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire publishes the texts of historic documents relating to the two counties - everything from wills, deeds and inquests to letters and financial accounts. Each volume includes a scholarly introduction to the text.
4. Online Parish Clerks for the County of Lancashire
The Online Parish Clerks project for the County of Lancashire aims to extract and preserve the records from the various parishes and to provide online access to that data, FREE of charge, along with other data of value to family and local historians conducting research in the County of Lancashire. Data and records are presented from the earliest records that can be found up to approximately the end of the 19th century. At that time there were almost 400 parishes within the pre 1974 county boundaries of Lancashire.
5. Lancashire Local History Federation
The Lancashire History Federation website provides some other ideas of platforms for potential research and archives.
6. Blackpool Family History Centre
The Local and Family History Centre holds a comprehensive collection of material for those with an interest in local or family history, including Blackpool electoral registers 1930 to date, historic Ordnance Survey maps of the Fylde area, local trade directories 1816 to 1969, Fylde area Census records 1841 to 1901. It also contains comprehensive parish records from Lancashire parishes, local newspapers from 1845, local newspaper indexes & cuttings, historic local holiday guides for Blackpool, and our local historic photograph collection.