Discovery is the new catalogue (still under development) of The National Archives, UK, AKA TNA –described as “over 20 million descriptions of records created by central government and the courts of law of England and Wales”.
Researchers can search the collections and download digital copies of records, where available. Currently over 5 % of the vast collection has been digitised and is a pay for view service but is available at Yarra Plenty Regional Library as a free e-resource for family history researchers, which can be accessed via our website in a library. Researchers are encouraged to save their search results on their portable USB drives. These will usually be in the form of a PDF or JPG image - for easy transfer to home computers.
Popular collections include, Royal Navy service records, medals, RAF combat reports, Royal Marines service records and wills (but deciphering the hand writing on some of these documents is another blog story!). See
Wills & Probate Records A search in the new Discovery can be refined by a filter beside the initial results list. Such as by operations, battles and campaigns or date or actual collection.
There is also an advanced search facility. Discovery will eventually replace Documents Online but for now you can access it here
