The Nosey Genealogist

I’ve put together this short video to explain a bit about Beginning Family History Research.

The web has made the quest to find our ancestors so much easier to do. As more and more data finds its way onto the Internet many more lines of enquiry are opened up to us. But, with this, is the danger of information overload. The new family historian may become frozen in the headlights as the genealogical data juggernaut races on towards them.

Here is some free advice about how to organize your family tree search so that in the long run you save yourself time and quite possibly money. The video also proposes that it is that it is well worth continuing to learn as much as you can about this fascinating subject of Family History by taking courses or reading around the subject. As I have read recently, the best family historian is one that thinks of themselves as an advanced beginner. That is, they are always open to learning more skills. The more skilled you get, the better you will be able to find those elusive ancestors! For beginners advice have a look at my new site here:
http://www.NoseyGenealogist.com

From YouTube…

I love to listen to the professional family historians explaining their various techniques in genealogical research to me. The advice I have had on how to trace my ancestors and build my family tree has, I have come to realise, so often saved me time in doing my own family research.

Genealogy has captured the imagination of a good many of us and as it has the number of websites serving us with databases, or transcriptions, seems to have multiplied like topsy. Sometimes we may not know where to turn and this is especially so if we are starting out. When I first ventured on-line to research my forebears I found some ancestors easy to find on sites like ancestry.co.uk etc. while others seemed to insist on remaining hidden. I hit some brick walls and, where this happened, I put those particular ancestor lines to one side to concentrate on the easy ones to find.

This eventually began to frustrate me. The solution was to learn the tips and tricks that seasoned family history researchers used and so I enrolled on some e-courses. The trouble was that work or other pressure on time would mean that I couldn’t keep up and that I really needed to be able to learn at my own pace when I had a minute or two to do so.

Else Churchill, of the Society of Genealogists, writing in Your Family Tree Magazine, Issue 77, May 2009 says that “The best family historians are those who make an effort to learn about the resources they use and the context in which the records were created.” So I make every effort to continue to learn about this subject that so fascinates me.

Now I will not claim to be any where close to being an “expert”. I am someone who has moved along the line from being an absolute beginner, having picked up some skill sets along the way. I heard recently that some experts consider themselves to be simply “advanced beginners”. This is supposed to reflect the fact that we can all continue to learn more about our subject.

As we gain knowledge, it is also great to be able to share it with others who are just starting out. I have been planning for some time to make available my own simple guide to Beginning Family History on the Internet and to supplement it with some audio podcasts and screen capture help videos. It is now ready for publication as a download resource package. This means that it is distributed in three compressed (or .zip) files from a page within my new website at any time of the day or night. Once you have downloaded it to your computer you can read the pdf manual at your own convenience and listen to the podcasts or watch the video whenever suits you.

Take a look at this link below for what it contains:

http://www.noseygenealogist.com/familyhistorian/index.html

‘Beginning Family History Research: Tracing Your Ancestors on the Web

I need to remember my own advice to use more than one ancestor look up site!

When I talk to new family historians starting out in family history about how I try to carry out my own research I often quote the advice I have been given by the professionals that have taught me the tricks and tips of doing good family history research. Now I do not consider myself to be a Genealogical Guru, simply someone who has gained a little experience over the years and am happy to pass it on here.

One of the principles is to think logically about a person’s time-line. When they were born will obviously dictate approximately when they could have got married and when you should expect them to have died. Not many people are going to be getting married in their hundredth year and they are unlikely to get married aged 6, so beware of entries that have the same name as your ancestor but are just plain wrong.

Another thing that I am aware of, and will happily tell others to do, is to listen to family stories and then step back and try to corroborate them by going and finding the hard evidence to back them up.

This weekend I have got myself stuck in a hole and wasting time digging it deeper and deeper! What was it I was doing wrong and how did I finally get out of it? I was trying to find the details of an ancestor’s death so that I could purchase a death certificate from the GRO site.

I am fairly wedded to www.ancestry.co.uk for most of my research. I like what they have on offer and I have become use to the way the site works. I also have a subscription to other sites such as www.thegenealogist.co.uk which I find good for many searches and I also like www.findmypast.com.

The research was sparked off by reading some “thoughts” put down on paper by a person before he died and passed on to his children, the next generation to read. I had been shown this family history because, as a cousin, I had an ancestor in common with them and I wanted to enter this forbear into my family tree as well. The handwritten notes indicated that our ancestor had died aged 66 and from this I was able to work out that as they were born in 1865 then this computed to them dying in 1930.

I went on to ancestry.co.uk and searched by name for the ancestor in all four quarters of 1930 but to no avail. I then broadened my research for ten years either side and spent hours looking for them without any luck. I then thought I’d try misspellings of the ancestor’s name as this, I thought, is surely why they are missing. Result: Nothing!

Eventually, after much wasted time, I thought about using one of the other websites that offers Birth marriage and death details, something I should have done early on. And what did I find? There he was, on the other BMD site spelt correctly and dying in the district where I expected him too, but aged 70 not 66 and in the year 1935 not 1930!

The lessons for me to relearn and hopefully for you to benefit from are as follows:

• Remember that all websites are fallible and omissions happen
• Family stories can sometimes be wrong as humans are not blessed with 100 percent recall and we can get things wrong, as it would seem this relative did in his writings for his children!

Family History research is a passion of mine and so The Nosey Genealogist blog was born to give me a platform to go on and on about it. This is because I am painfully aware that not everyone shares with me a desire to populate their family tree with ancestors and so I try not to bore the pants off all my friends with it. I was, however, talking to a friend the other day about the subject and they asked me where on earth do they begin?

I’ve posted about this before on this blog, but it is worth mentioning that when ever I get asked about where to start I always tell them to begin with the five Golden Rules.

In my recent request from my friend I told them the following:

“Start at the beginning, that is…your beginning.

“Note down your parent’s names, their dates and places of birth, when they married and where. Ask them about their youth and any organisations or religious denominations that they belonged to. Did they stay in the locality of their birth or did they move? What is, or was, their occupations?”

After that I suggested they collated the same information on both sets of grandparents. If they are still with us, I told my friend to go and talk to them about their younger lives; as family historians we are often amazed at what rich background to family history research we can gain from talking to the older generations.

If my friend’s parents and or grandparents have died, then I would have suggested they find out where they are buried, or their ashes scattered and write down the cemetery or place for those generations that follow ours will thank us for this saving on their time spent researching their family. So the 5 rules, that I have distilled from the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are magazine published back in 2007 are as follows…

1. Start with whatever facts are known and work backwards, trying to make sure that each new piece of information is checked against original records to make sure of its validity.
2. At every stage, document the evidence noting down your sources. Tip: These can be people or paperwork.
3. Keep records of what you find, even the wrong avenues you have gone down. Doing this will help you not make the same mistake at a later stage in your research.
4. Be wary of information supplied by others as it may not be correct and always do your own research to back up what you have been told. Be particularly wary of information posted online.
5. When you are up a dead end seek help from family history societies, professional organisations, forums and specialist magazines.

Good luck if, just like my friend, you are starting out. Before you go any further should I mention just how addictive Family History can become?

Nick Thorne - The Nosey Genealogist

Here are some pitfalls waiting for the family history researcher when looking at Parish records that I have read about recently.

1. The handwriting can be difficult to decipher. It may vary enormously from parish to parish depending on the vicar or clerk writing it. The art of reading old handwriting is called palaeography and you may find various books available to purchase.
2. The registers are often no more than copies of the original daily memorandum book. These may have been written up once a year and so the possibility of mistakes creeping in or entries being left out becomes a real possibility.
3. Gaps in the registers or they are missing altogether.
4. Details lacking from the Parish record as there was no standard as to what should be recorded in early times.
5. Before 1733 most legal documents would be written in Latin, although surnames would not be translated into Latin.
6. Spelling of surnames may vary from the norm.
7. Children were not baptised at all, or were christened when they were older. In one of my paternal lines four or five were all baptised together on the same day!
8. Periods of non-conformity, again in my same paternal line I find several children christened in the established church and then several more in the Presbyterian chapel.
9. Illegitimacy, parentage in doubt? Make a search of the local poor law records such as Bastardy bonds.
10. A person may be mistaken and not know where they were born. The solution is to widen your search to other parishes.
11. People moved about more than many expect so be prepared to look at surrounding Parishes from the one you assume your ancestors hailed from. Following on from this is that the family may have moved into the area from a different parish. Here you should do a search of parishes on the IGI or the County Record Office for a ten mile radius. A great piece of software to help find the names of the neighbouring parishes is the Parish Locator free from this website:http://web.onetel.net.uk/~gdlawson/parfind.htm
12. The change of the calendar in 1752 may be a pitfall for you to tumble into if you are not aware of it. England and Wales adopted the Gregorian calendar in September 1752.

• 11 days were omitted - the day after 2^nd September 1752 became the 14^th September.

• The first day of the year, or Supputation of the Year became the 1^st of January.

• Prior to this in England 7 Wales, the year began on Lady Day, or the 25^th March. This would mean that the 24^th of March 1750 would be the last day of 1750 and the next day was the 25^th of March 1751, and a new year.

The Calendar Act 1750 changed this situation, so that the day after 31 December 1751 was 1 January 1752. As a consequence, 1751 was a very short year - it ran only from 25 March to 31 December.

The year had previously been broken up into quarters, still in use for some legal practices, Lady Day (25^th March), Midsummers Day (24^th June), Michaelmas Day (29^th September) and Christmas day 925^th December).

To throw even more confusion into this situation, Scotland had already changed the first day of the year to 1 January in 1600 and so 1599 was a short year there ( remember that in 1600, Scotland was a completely separate kingdom). What has to be recognised is that when King James VI of Scotland also became King James I of England in 1603, the possibilities of date confusion must have been very large indeed.

Food for thought!

While I was visiting London I was asked to help research an Indian Army Officer from the Second World War. This person had joined up in the UK and transferred from England to the Indian Army serving in the Royal Indian Army Service Corps.

The aim was to find the officer’s birth date for a daughter, as the details were not recorded elsewhere in her family because of his divorce, early on in her life.

At the British Library, once reader registration was completed, we entered the Africa & Asia Room. The staff at the desk were very helpful and pointed us to the Indian Army Lists where we were able to find the Second Lieutenant in the volume for 1943 under RIASC. For some reason, however, although most other entries had dates of birth listed, our man had not!

All was not lost as my accomplice could provide the necessary paperwork to show that she was the man’s daughter. With this the British Library staff were able to go away and come back with his actual service record and she was able to read his record, to see his signature and to take a note of his date and place of birth. With this valuable information she can now start researching the paternal branch of her family that until now had seemed closed to her.

A search on ancestry.co.uk with the correct details gave his birth and death index record to follow up on.

Its been a long time since I posted due to being away on holiday and then coming back to a mound of work, but here is the first of some new posts.

While away I was able to go to Kew and The National Archives. The aim of the trip was to familiarise myself with the place as any serious Family History Researcher is going to have to use TNA at some point in their genealogical searches. I had looked at the website http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ many times before. This time I was planning my first visit to Kew and so I determined what I was going to look for when I got there. I wanted to try and find my great-great-grandfather’s baptismal records in the nonconformist registers.

The current investigation of my paternal line, the Thorne’s or Thorn’s of Dartmouth (if you have read my previous post you will know that Thomas Henry added an “e” to our surname in the 1850’s) has shown that g-g-grandfather THORNE was buried in the churchyard of the CofE church of St.Saviour’s, Dartmouth and that he married g-g-grandmother Ellen MALSER in St.Mary’s CofE church in Portsea, Portsmouth. His parent’s, John THORN and Elizabeth SISSELL seemed to have married in St.Saviours in April 1817 but I could not find the Christening of Henry in St.Saviours even though there were other children of John and Elizabeth baptised there.

The answer seems to be that for a period of time the family left the Established church, as from 1826 to 1836 and every two years between these dates, a Thorn was baptised in the Presbyterian Chapel in Dartmouth! This included Henry Thomas Thorn, my g-g-grandfather.

How did I find this?

Well I had used Hugh Wallis‘ site to identify the records and give me the dates (http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~hughwallis/

IGIBatchNumbers.htm#Menu

)

Then on TNA’s website I used the catalogue to find Word or Phrase: Dartmouth and Department or Series code: RG - which is the Records of the General Register Office, Government Social Survey Department, and Office of Population Censuses and Surveys.

This gave me the answer that DEVON, Dartmouth (Presbyterian) Baptisms were at: RG 4/959 and could be accessed at TNA in Kew.

So when I arrived I was able to go to the banks of draws containing micro film, select the correct one and go to a microfilm reader and scroll through until I found my g-g-grandfather and some of his siblings!

It should have been easy, but I got side tracked and as it was unfamiliar to me with so many interesting things that could be looked up, it took an age longer than it did the next time I visited.

Oh yes, I got hooked and had to come back another day. But that is a story for another post.

You probably may have had some experience of looking up ancestors using the International Genealogical Index (IGI) on the website of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) http://www.familysearch.org . If not I should explain that it is a compilation of entries from baptism and marriage registers drawn from parishes and their equivalent form all over the world. For those of us with UK roots it represents us well with index records with some English counties in particular having excellent coverage.

Once again I am indebted to Pharos Tutors for introducing me a handy website that aids the family history researcher find their way around the LDS site and helps us know what registers are available on the IGI. It is the site maintained by Hugh Wallis.

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~hughwallis/IGIBatchNumbers.htm

As Hugh Wallis says, in the introduction to his website, it is not always simple to find your ancestors (even when they are there to be found in the IGI) using the search mechanisms provided by familysearch.org. The reason being that to search by last name only is not permitted unless you search within a single batch of records at a time or, across the entire country! Now a search for a last name across the whole of England is a very tall order, remember it is not even a search of single county, let alone a town you are having to do. If you have a rare name, Hugh Wallis suggests, might be OK to do, but if you are looking for a Smith or a Jones then you have a big problem!

The possible ranges he allows you to access are the Births/Christenings and Marriages. I really can not recommend this tool highly enough.

Lastly, just remember that the IGI:

• is incomplete – and this applies not only on a parish by parish basis, but to within parishes as well where gaps may also be found

• is compiled from several different types of record including members of the church supplying information that can be inaccurate and not only from the original parish register

• has countless mistakes due to problems with interpreting handwriting and the fore mentioned member submitted entries

• does not, except for a few cases, cover burials;

• is only an index and as such should not be considered a substitute for looking at the original record.

As I try to get back a generation from where the census records on line stop in 1841 I am having to turn to Parish Records. For my Scottish line I have been able to use the easily accessed old parish records (OPR) on Scotlandspeople website, but for my English line the lack of scanned records means the challenge of learning how to break into this area of family history research is a fascinating new subject for me.

I was re-reading the first chapter of The book on British Genealogy and Family History yesterday. I am talking about Mark Herber’s book Ancestral Trails.

It has a great section on understanding relationships. No I don’t mean its a help for couples going through tough times, more what the terms stepfather, half-brother and so on means! It explains simply that “step” indicates that there is no blood relationship between parties and only a relationship through marriage. “Half” is something different and is where the parties only have one parent in common.

Now I was very aware of this terminology myself as, in my family, I have a stepmother and a half-sister and had a step-grandfather. So, while these relationships are actual fact, somehow to me when I see these cold terms used to describe people that I am extremely fond it appears to me as if I am trying to distance myself from them in some way. I’d like to take this opportunity to say that this is just not true. But in Family history research we sometimes have to be precise in relationships and detail exactly where and how people fit into our family tree. None more so when we have to deal with illegitimacy.

Where as today, being born to parents that are not married carries little stigma, in the past it was a different story and so it needs to be dealt with sensitively when dealing with relatives of a different generation.

Staying with this chapter from Mark Herber’s book I was amused to realise that when, at a family wedding, my first cousin once removed, introduced me to one of her friends of her own generation as being “Mum’s cousin” she was in fact being completely correct in her description. As Herber says: “Relationships between cousins are more complex. Cousins are people who share a common ancestor…The children of two siblings are “first” cousins of each other. The children of two first cousins are “second” cousins of each other and so on.”

OK so far, but then we move on to different generations. The word we use to denote this is “removed” so my first cousin’s daughter is my cousin once removed. When she has a child it will be my first cousin twice removed. We have to work out the number of intervening generations between ourselves and the common ancestor and use that number before the word “removed”. Now here comes the bit that I had forgotten!

“The word “removed” is generally only used to express relationships down a family tree.” So this was why Jenny, my first cousin once removed, being the daughter of my first cousin Julie was correct when she referred to me as her “mum’s cousin”

Here ends the pedant’s lesson for today!

Mark Herber’s book Ancestral Trails available from all good bookshops.

I’ve been doing a bit of genealogical research recently using the BMD indexes of vital records from the GRO. For any new Family Historians reading this, the following is something I’ve distilled out of a super course offered by Pharos Tutors online.

Until July 1837 there was not a “nationwide” system for recording Births Marriages and Deaths. What England and Wales did have was a parish register system administered by the Church of England, which had been in operation since 1538.

The state, however, increasingly wanted to be able to count its citizens and produce some sort of meaningful statistics with a view to finding out if the population of the country was going up over time. Another worry, for the authorities, was the marriage law that had become unsatisfactory in the 18th century because of the number of non-conformists worshipping outside of the established church. While Jews and Quakers kept records they were, of course, outside of the system and yet other religious groups were not keeping any form of register at all. So, by 1832, when parliamentary and constitutional reforms were passed and followed by reform of the poor law system in 1843, the state could now do something about the situation.

Thus, in 1836, two Acts of Parliament were passed…

1. The Marriage Act - which amended existing legislation for marriage procedures and brought in the addition of the registry office marriage which allowed non conformist to marry in a civil ceremony. Sometimes you will see it referred to as the “Dissenters Marriage Bill”
2. Act for Registering Births Marriages & Deaths in England - which repealed previous legislation that regulated parish and other registers.

By the summer of 1837, the first published indexes were produced with the September quarter index. It included all the births, marriages and deaths for July, August and September of the year being sent in to the General Register Office by the various Superintendent Registrars who, in turn, had collated the returns from local registrars. The Superintendent Registrar’s districts were based on those of the old Poor Law Unions and this means that some of them would be based on districts that may stray over county borders and thus could be a cause of confusion for today’s genealogical researcher!

So beware when looking for that elusive ancestor that should have been born, married or died in one county only to find that they appear in the registers of a town in the neighbouring one!