History research at your library

East Tilbury, Grays and Blackshots libraries

East Tilbury library will be closed all day on Saturday 16 October. Grays library will close at 5pm on Thursday 21 October. Blackshots library will be closed all day on Saturday 23 October. We apologise for any inconvenience.

You can still order and renew library items online or use libraries order and collect to ask our staff to choose items.

Family history

Every Thurrock library gives free use of the Ancestry and Find My Past websites.

A Thurrock or Essex County Council library card is all you need, but you can only access Ancestry and Find My Past through our library computers. You can use library computers for up to 1 hour a day.

As well as books on how to research your family, Grays library has a collection of family history resources on the first floor:

  • Thurrock parish registers – births, deaths, marriages – on microfilm
  • Thurrock census returns on microfilm 1841-1891
  • Thurrock census returns on microfiche 1901
  • indexes to census returns 1851,1881
  • Thurrock electoral registers 1936-2001