Digital Downloads allows you to access records online anytime and anywhere via Discovery, our catalogue.
There are over 8.8 million records available to download:
Digitised collections
First and Second World War
Explore our records on First and Second World War soldiers, sailors and air men, battles, battalions, and much more.
Military and maritime
Trace the voyages made by a merchant seaman, find a Royal Marine’s medal record or track the wartime history of an army regiment.
Royal Navy
- 1 million records of men and women who served in the Royal Navy and related services
- Service records of 116,000 Royal Marines between 1842 and 1925
Wills and Death Duties
- 1 million Wills from 1384 to 1858 in the jurisdiction of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury
- Death duty accounts for 72,000 people who died between 1796 and 1811
Migration
- Aliens’ Registration cards, 1918 to 1957
- Naturalisation case papers from 1801 to 1871.
Social and cultural history
Discover documents charting:
- the history of the NHS
- over 15,000 photographs of the British countryside, towns and villages in the inter-war years
- countless other records showing the development of British life.
British political history and government policy
Records charting the development of Britain, military, defence and colonial policy and the impact on citizens’ lives in the 20th century.
Domesday Book
Use our filtered search and download both a colour image of the folio on which your entry appears and a translation of all the text on that folio (not just the text of the entry for which you searched).
Security Services
Containing what were once top-secret files from the UK Security Service, otherwise known as MI5, these records cover a broad range of individuals and subjects spanning the inter-war years, Second World War and post-war era up to the mid-1960s.
They reveal much about the activities of Cold War spies, communist sympathisers, the British fascist movement both during and after the Second World War and other individuals subject to Security Service enquiry between 1926 and 1964.
Cabinet Papers
The minutes of all Cabinet meetings, from 1916 to 1991, and all the memoranda discussed at these meetings have been digitised.
And that’s not the only attractive feature – because the documents have optical character recognition (OCR) facility, you can search the actual contents of the documents using keywords and then focus precisely on specific extracts of interest.
Other digitised collections
- Land and maps
- Medieval and early modern history
- Records for current legal purposes
- Criminals courts and prisons
- Reports of UFOs
- Intelligence Services
- Commission for Looted Art in Europe
You can filter your Discovery search for digitised records only, making it quick and easy to access large numbers of historical records from multiple collections.
And in order to help pinpoint your research, we provide a comprehensive set of guides to help locate the documents relevant to you.
During the time that our Kew site is closed to visitors, we are making digital records free to download to signed-in users. Find out more in the news story.
Universities and other institutions can take advantage of our subscription service.
Please email digitaldownloads@nationalarchives.gov.uk to find out more about our subscription service.