Happy New Year everybody!
I am just back from a trip away to visit the family for the Christmas break and inevitably got to meet some people who are interested in their family history and knowing my interest in the subject had various questions for me. Some wanted to be given quite specific advice on how to find an ancestor, while others just wanted to know how to make a start in this hobby.
For the beginners I trotted out the well worn mantra that you should write down everything that you know about your family as far back as you can go. I advised them to concentrate on the information that they knew on their parents, grandparents and, if possible, their great-grandparents while noting down the names, dates of birth, marriages and deaths together with the places that these events had happened in.
I told my friends that they should record where in the world that their ancestors lived and in what part of the country this was, as that would have a bearing on where to look for the records. Then they could make a start with the census collections and gradually work back making sure to always look at the original image to check for spelling and only use transcripts as a useful guide to the former warning them that the transcript could have been copied down incorrectly.
For the slightly more advanced, I explained about locating difficult to find relatives by using a variant of the surname. Expanding that, as spelling in the records was not consistent and relied on the way it may have sounded to the vicar who was entering it in the parish register, their ancestor’s name may be spelt differently from the way that they wrote it today. I advised about visiting the County Record offices to search for information and how the Archon search on the National Archives website could be used to find repositories.
Other new friends asked me about searching for wills, Apprentice indentures and marriage licences. Then there was the conversations that I had about taxation records and also the manorial records.
I was so pleased to find that more and more people seem to be interested in the subject and I do hope that they discover what a fascinating pass-time that this is and begin to enjoy the detective work as I do!
I recently got this Press Release from TheGenealogist.co.uk. It seems they have made their TreeView even better..
TreeView Gets Radical New Features:
The highly respected TreeView, a favorite of reviewers has launched unique new features and “views”.
TreeView is free to all. You can access it at TheGenealogist.co.uk and TreeView.co.uk
Five Brand New Views
CustomTree
For the first time ever online, TreeView has made it possible to draw your own custom family tree. The custom family tree option lets you pick between pedigree, hourglass or full tree view, you can pick the number of generations you want and then the fun begins. Drag and drop anyone you wish around the tree, remove people from the tree by simply clicking the X on them. If you make a mistake, no problem, just click “undo”. You can also upload a picture to include as a background to your tree. This quickly and easily gives you a fully custom layout of your family tree. When you’re happy with the result, you can save your design for later or print it out.
(You can select a person within custom tree and easily move them around the chart)
Relationship Tree
Using the Relationship Tree you can select any two members from your tree and generate a chart to show the relationship links between those two ancestors. The chart will appear on screen and from here you can choose to a print a copy.
Ancestor Chart
The ancestor chart shows you the direct line ancestors of a selected individual, with the option to display as many generations as you wish.
Descendant Chart
Alternatively, the descendant chart shows you the direct descendants of an individual.
Hourglass Tree
An alternative design for your tree is an Hourglass Tree. This chart is a combination of ancestor and descendant charts, including both direct ancestors and descendants of a person for as many generations as you wish.
Brand New Features
Printing Trees – You can now print any tree. When clicking on the Print icon you will be asked to select one of the following print options;
All in One: This option emails you a PDF of the entire tree on one page, enabling you to send the PDF to your local printer, so you can have your family tree printed on one large sheet of paper.
Or
Several Pages: This option will divide your tree over several A4 sheets of paper allowing you to print from a standard printer at home. The A4 sheets are discreetly numbered and come with a guide, making it easier for you to piece them together once they have printed.
Tree Backgrounds
Now all trees come with the option to customise your background, from a variety of different colours, patterns or even use one of your own images.
Backup/Restore – Routinely save your tree and restore from previous backups or imported GEDCOM files. So now you can tweak your tree without the worry of making a mistake.
Relationship Calculator – You can calculate the relationship between any two ancestors in your tree. Type the name of the two individuals into the calculator and the relationship between them will be shown in the results box.
If you are looking at your Full Tree or Pedigree view, click any individual and their relationship to the default person will be displayed in the dialog box.
Friends New Features
The ability to invite friends and family to view your tree is now free to everyone.
Friends Options – In addition to the access level you can now set a Role for your friends.
Select either ‘Guest’ or ‘Proposer’. A ‘Guest’ can view a limited or an extended view of your family tree. A ‘Proposer’ makes proposals for changes or additions to your tree without changing the data. This provides a safe way for your friends and family to help you fill in the blanks to your tree.
Hope you find this useful for recording your family history.
Have a very Happy Christmas,
Nick.
As many of us find out, when we start to research our family history, our forebears can be a mixture of characters who can come from different walks of life and backgrounds.
In my case I have agricultural labourers, small businessmen, carpenters and brass-founders. There are mariners, soldiers and an intriguing line that “lived on their own means” and are descended from Scottish nobility, albeit in some cases, from the “wrong side of the blanket”.
One of these ancestors, who has always interested me, is a 2 x great-grandfather who appears on the various census as not having an occupation other than owning houses and funds. I had traced Charles Crossland Hay back from Cheltenham in England, where he died in 1858, to his birth in Dunbar in Scotland in 1797 the son of a merchant, who was also called Charles Hay, and his wife Mary Ann Stag. Charles Hay senior then moves his home to Edinburgh and then I pick up the son, Charles Crossland Hay, living at Auchindinny House, near Lasswade, before he marries his bride from Fife in 1832.
Over their life together they have seven children. Two of which are born in Scotland with four born in England and the seventh, my great grandfather, born in France. This last child is registered as a British subject and is christened in Lasswade, back in Scotland, and so his details were to be found on the ScotlandsPeople website.
With the recent launch online of The British Newspaper Archive at http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/
I have, at last, gained more information that has allowed me to find out more about the business of my 2x great-grandfather, through a report on the tragic death of one of his other sons: William.
William Wemyss Frewen Hay died at the age of 30 from a fall over the cliffs in Alderney on a visit to the garrison there. In the newspaper article it stated that he was the son of the late Charles Crossland Hay of the firm Hay, Merricks & Co of Roslin.
Now I could start using the search engines to find out about the company, but first of all I did a search of the newspapers for the business. I was rewarded by finding advertisements for their “Sporting Gunpowder” in papers from all over the country.
I went on to find samples of the gunpowder for sale at Christie’s and books mentioning the products digitised and on Google books.
Looking at a map I could also see that Roslin is but a stones throw away from Auchendinny and from the Lasswade parish church, so explaining the family’s link to the area.
On Google Books, I came across a Report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons in 1837-8 dealing with the effect of fictitious votes in Scotland after the Reform Act brought in by the Whigs. There is a list of voters and how they voted included in the document, something that would be unthinkable today. The four business partners of Hay, Merricks & Company of Roslin Powder Mills, which include Charles Crossland Hay, are all recorded as being voters for the Whig party in the years between 1832 to1850 at Roslin.
So now I have ascertained that my ancestor voted for the Whig party and was involved in the manufacture of gunpowder and all this has flowed from a newspaper report into the horrific, slow, painful death of his second son William in 1867 on Alderney, and who was actually born in 1836, two years before the report on fictitious votes was published.
What this shows me, is how events that occur at different points in a timeline and which get reported, can so easily unlock brick walls that occur at other times in the timeline.
I have happily been spending some time looking around the newly launched British Newspaper Archive in the hope of finding ancestors from my family tree mentioned in articles or advertisements.
I can report that I have had some brilliant luck with some and no luck at all with others. I also have noticed that you have to deploy a lateral thought process to the search for a name mentioned in an article as an ancestor may have been named in full, or with initials or been misspelt by the journalist writing the piece.
Many results are clear and you can decide to save them by bookmarking them on the site. Some selections are, however, not so clear. The tip I would give you is to try and read the snippets, next to the results, with an open mind. On quite a few occasions my brain could make sense of the Gobbledygook that the optical character recognition OCR reports back for that article and recognised family names or places that otherwise would be disregarded as meaningless characters.
For example:
At Cuttlehill Farm, Cross?ates. wit I I 12th ir.st., Helen Carmichael, wire of Jo»B| I jL C. Foord...
becomes: At Cuttlehill Farm, Crossgates. On the 12th instance, Helen Carmichael, wife of John I L C Foord…
And now on to my discovery. I have, for some time, known of a 2x great-uncle that had been killed from a fall over the cliffs in Alderney and buried back on the English mainland near Weymouth. I had first come across this fact in a privately published book on the monumental inscriptions of a church in Cheltenham. In Christ Church Cheltenham there is a monument on the wall to his parents and at some time a local historian had written not only about the people commemorated by these plaques but also about their family.
As I am resident in Jersey I was intrigued to find that there was a family connection to the more northerly Channel Island and yet I had found nothing to explain how one of my ancestors had met his demise there. A few minutes on The British Newspaper Archive has solved this for me and I am now investigating this further.
To take a look at this great new resource for family historians go to:
Searching for Militia Records
Some of our ancestors may not have been in the regular military but nonetheless served their country as members of the militia, yeomanry, fencibles or volunteer regiments. These local part-timers should leave behind them records that we as family historians can still research.
Normally there would have been at least one regiment in each county made up of a mixture of conscripts and volunteers. The practice of establishing these local forces having come into being from 1757 onwards with the aim of replacing the regular Army in the British Isles as the latter deployed abroad to fight the country’s wars.
The National Archives at Kew
Family historians can find the surviving attestation papers in class WO96 in The National Archives in Kew where you can also locate musters and pay lists for these men. Note the word “surviving” as regretfully not all have managed to make it through the ravages of time.
Another place to do research within is the county record office for the area where the militia unit would have been based. If you are lucky these records may be fully indexed in some online catalogues. There is also the Militia attestations database to search on British Origins (www.britishorigins.com) that rely on TNA’s class WO96 and can be searched by name. We are told that eventually the images will become available on TNA’s Documents Online at www.nationalarchives.gov.uk but not at present.
Also ancestors, that were in the various militias, should appear in muster lists. These also are in WO96 where they survive.
One tip that I learnt, some time back, is that if you have found an ancestor in a battalion and its number is the 3rd or some other subsequent number, then this is an indication that it is a militia or similar battalion; with the 1st and 2nd being made up of the regulars.
Cheshire Family Records
I see that Findmypast.co.uk has discovered a number of interesting finds within their newly available local records for Cheshire. The Workhouse records, parish registers, bishop’s transcripts and electoral registers from this English county were published by them recently in what findmypast.co.uk has called ‘The Cheshire Collection.’ It is a series of over ten million historic records that have been provided for them by the Cheshire Archives and Local Studies and which covers more than 350 years of Cheshire history.
One or two of the most interesting are:
- Lewis Carroll’s baptism took place in Daresbury on the 11th of July 1832
- An earthquake hit Cheshire on 18 March 1612
- Ancestors of the James Bond actor, Daniel Craig, sold coal and were iron moulders
A really unusual record that can be found in this collection is that of the ‘peculiar marriage’ between Daniel Broadbent and Martha Cheetham in Mottram-in-Longdendale on 9 March 1780. So what was strange about it? The fact that Daniel was just 23 and Martha was 83 years old! As you would expect death was soon to part them, but if we look at the Mottram registers for just the following year we will find that it was Daniel Broadbent of Hattersley who was buried on 30 May 1781.
In another record we can find that, on 6 May 1776, 105 year-old George Harding wed Jane Darlington, 75, at St Oswald, Chester.
These unusual marriage records just go to show that, in the 18th century, people found love at any age. However, the records also reveal a darker side of Cheshire’s past, telling several tales of death from the plague.
In 1625 the country fell under an outbreak of the plague that went on to kill 35,000 people. One area that was affected was Malpas in Cheshire. From the online records harrowing accounts of those who were killed by the disease can be found. For example, there was one Richard Dawson of Bradley, whose tale in The Cheshire Collection, is as follows:
“…being sick of the plague and perceiving that he must die at that time arose out of his bed and made his grave and caused his nephew to cast straw into the grave… and went and lay him down in the said grave, and caused clothes to be laid upon and so departed out of this world… he died about 28th august, this much I was credibly told.”
Family history records from the ancestors of Daniel Craig and the discovery of the Cheshire earthquake surprised Debra Chatfield, marketing manager at findmypast.co.uk. She commented: “These records make it possible for family historians and local history researchers to delve as far back as 1538, unearthing all sorts of unusual finds quickly and easily at their fingertips. Who would have known that Cheshire was hit by an earthquake in 1612 or that James Bond’s ancestors sold lumps of coal?”
Jonathan Pepler, County Archivist for Cheshire Archives and Local Studies, said: “This is a very exciting development for everyone interested in Cheshire and its rich history.”
Disclosure: Links on this page are Compensated Affiliate Links.
Fantastic Society of Genealogist Course!
I’ve been to London this weekend and, on Saturday, I attended a great course at the Society of Genealogists on My Ancestor Came From Devon given by the society’s Genealogist Else Churchill.
Over the afternoon we were introduced to what we would be able to find in the library at the SoG in Charterhouse Buildings and where to look on the internet for Devon sources.
The talk encompassed sources for beginners to beyond and if you can’t make it down to Devon itself and find getting to London easier, then what is available at the SoG really is a good alternative for anyone who, like me, have Devonian ancestors.
I shall be returning to this lecture in a future post, but today I’d just like to mention some of the resources that were highlighted by Else Churchill.
The Society of Genealogists has registers for about 10,000 parishes. It houses published indexes and finding aids including the Devon FHS publications and also has many transcripts and indexes in microfilm and CDs. There are various trade directories spanning from 1783 to the 1930s in the library and poll books particularly from Exeter and Plymouth.
Many of us subscribe to one or other of the subscription sites, but very few of us can afford to belong to more than one or two. Well that is where a visit to the SoG can be useful as they have free access to a number of the pay per view websites so allowing us to do searches on the sites that we don’t subscribe to ourselves. This is an important resource for the family historian, as often the way the database has been transcribed can have a bearing on what you are able to find on one over another. So if you have hit a brick wall and can’t find a forbear on one site then it is worth looking on another. Also one may be stronger for the counties that you are interested in. Findmypast turns out to be particularly good for Devon.
Military Records and Family History
I am just back from a visit to a shopping centre and I could not miss the veterans and young cadets selling poppies on every street I walked down. It is, of course, at this time of the year that we, as a nation, pause to remember our fallen servicemen and women.
As a family historian I began to think of the records that are available to us and came across a press release from TheGenealogist.co.uk that lays out what is gathered together on their website. To begin with there are the Rolls of Honour.
Rolls of Honour
The Roll of Honour collection on TheGenealogist.co.uk contains over a million records and is included within all Premium and Personal Plus subscriptions.
Original images and full transcripts are available. Some of these are very detailed and include a portrait photograph.
De Ruvigny’s Roll of Honour 1914-1918
This online database includes biographies of over 25,000 men of the armed forces who lost their lives in the Great War. Many of the entries have linked photographs. The level of detail given varies due to the variety of sources used but all include the persons regiment, place and date of death. The families often lodged the biography with the publisher and these entries go into great detail about their lives.
The National Roll of the Great War
A tribute to the men and women who survived and died in the First World War, with 14 volumes in total, and contains over 110,000 records. This includes a collection of biographies of those who served during the Great War (1914-1918) and also includes brief accounts of how they joined up and demobilisation date. Many of the entries refer to combatants who survived the War and the National Roll of the Great War is the only detailed information available.
Bond of Sacrifice
Contains an alphabetical biographical record of all British Officers who fell in the Great War, from August 1914 to June 1915, with details of rank, regiment and date of death. Also includes portraits.
British Roll of Honour 1914-1918
Records can include detailed biographies with portraits and information on birth date, birth place, father’s name, education, career, and circumstances of death.
Chatham, Plymouth and Portsmouth Memorial Register 1914-1921Includes over 25,000 biographical records of officers and men of the Royal Navy who were lost at sea and were not recorded in any cemetery or on any battlefield.
The memorials were erected at the three home ports which are the manning ports of the Royal Navy. As well as listing the names of the dead, they also serve as a “Sea-mark” or “Leading-mark” for ships entering the ports.
These printed registers contain more detailed descriptions than are shown on the panels on the memorials. Each biography contains information on name, rank, ship, age, date of death, immediate family including address and photos.
The Victoria Cross and Distinguished Service Order records 1857-1923
This database includes nearly 25,000 biographical records of officers, non-commissioned officers and men of his Majesty’s naval, military and air forces who have been awarded these decorations from the time of their institution, with descriptions of the deeds and services which won the distinctions and with many biographical, and other details.
So as we get closer to the 11th of November perhaps it is a time to take a look at some of TheGenealogist’s records online.
Disclosure: The Links in the above are Compensated Affiliate links. If you click on them then I may be rewarded by The Genealogist.co.uk should you sign up for their subscription.
I’ve been reading a business tip today. It was all about what big company may wish to gobble up the likes of Ancestry.com in the future.
It began from the premise that family history was big business, with the more of us turning to online resources such as the subscription sites run by Ancestry who have grown their revenue every quarter since they went public on the New York Stock Exchange.
I have always thought of Ancestry as being one of the big players in the genealogical market. But this article, by The Mottley Fool, talks about the possible threat of a larger company than them entering the market. The likes of Facebook, Google, or Microsoft being their assumed predators.
All three of these organisations could take advantage of the massive amounts of information that they have acquired, plus the technological skills of the programmers that they employ to build a more streamlined search website than what is already on offer in the market.
As The Motley Fool points out Facebook has its Timeline feature, which is an indication that they have noticed the potential of our hobby. There is Google, a big player in organising information, to consider as well. Meanwhile, Microsoft have something called Project Greenwich which allows its users to collect together their photos, links, scanned objects, and potentially more information to create chronological timelines about specific events, people, places, or things. It would not take much for them to turn this into an interactive timeline of our family history.
It is suggested that by providing such a timeline that this would encourage people to remain as members of sites like Ancestry for longer and thus defend them against the problem of membership churn. The article concludes that perhaps these firms will go down the partnership route, or that Microsoft licenses its technology to the likes of Ancestry.
But who knows what will be on offer to us in the future in researching the past online?
Medieval Genealogy Difficulties
If we are to go back before the start of Parish Records being kept, in England that would be the year 1538, then no official records will have been complied on who was born, married or died in the country. It may have been the case that the priest in charge of a parish kept notes of what was happening in his church, but there was no official or standard form that they would have been kept in.
Records for the landowning members of society are much more likely to have been compiled than for the poorer classes of England. That said, however, records of people from the time do exist in the form of documents complied for other purposes rather than to detail the life events of a particular person.
Many of the records that have survived were produced for the Exchequer, Chancery and the law courts, or they relate to the land laws of the country.
A problem, for us in the twenty first century looking back, is that these records from medieval time are most often written in Latin and an abbreviated form at that. English began to be used from the late fifteenth century in more informal documents, but even so we are then faced with the old handwriting of the era and so it is not such an easy task.
The National Archives website has some useful tools in the form of online in-depth learning guides. These can also help you learn basic Latin skills useful for tackling the documents that you may come across. See the Beginners’ Latin and Palaeography guides.
