The names collected by the GB1900 Project are one of the largest groups of names in the List and were one of the first sources included at launch back in 2016. We previously had about 100,000 names from GB1900, between names of houses, crags, streams, woods and others. They were all taken from the second edition Ordnance Survey maps, which were completed between 1898-1908 – one of the maps that you can use whilst browsing the website.

However, it had become obvious that we still had some gaps, particularly in Gwynedd and Ynys Môn, where you could clearly see names written on the map, but without a recorded name point. GB1900 is finished now, having collected millions of names from across Britain, so we contacted them to see what Welsh names remained. After removing the names that we already had there were about 10,000 left, which were uploaded to the List at the start of this month and filled all the gaps – no doubt to the great relief of people in the North-West!

Along with the extra names from the Parochialia that were uploaded recently, this means that the List now holds 680,280 names. As well as this we also have some 13,000 names left from the Cynefin Project which have now been transcribed and are ready to upload, meaning that we are close to having 700,000 names, or to put it another way, that we have almost doubled the size of the List in the five years of its existence.

As you might expect, it’s been harder for us to develop the List during lockdown, without all the resources of the office, and with small children running about the house… But despite everything, the work continues. We’ve been concentrating on data cleansing during lockdown, rather than trying to upload more names, and only a few parishes in Carmarthenshire remain to be checked.

As well as correcting existing misspellings and mis-transcriptions we’ve also been working through the remaing dittos from the Cynefin Project, and hope to finish that, and have those 17,000 names ready for upload by Christmas.

We’ve also received a number of names from members of the public, so thank you very much to everyone who has sent in names to us. We’ll be talking more about those names in the next blogpost.