The Nosey Genealogist

On my mother’s side I have some Scottish blood, being descended from a branch of the Hay’s of Hopes. This family line goes back to one Edmond Hay, said to be born before 1636 and who became Laird of Hopes in Haddingtonshire, now in East Lothian.

Since finding his marriage on Scotlandspeople to Isobell Adinstoun on the 4th August 1664 in Cannongate, Edinburgh (within Hollyrood Palace) I have speculated that he may have been the son of the Lord of the neighbouring estate, Yester. This because the Lord of Yester was another “Hay”, John Hay 1st Earl of Tweeddale and Lord of Yester.

I have, however, received emails telling me that John Hay, Earl of Tweeddale had no such son. I have found mention that he was the “natural born” son and elsewhere in my research that he was not related to the neighbouring noble Hay’s of Yester at all!

While I was in London recently I made my first visit to The Society of Genealogists at 14 Charterhouse Buildings, Goswell Road, London EC1M 7BA. I went there with the purpose of looking at the parish records collections to see if I could trace my Devon “Thorn ancestors” back further than the early 1800s. While I found paper transcriptions of records for St. Saviour’s church in Dartmouth and so had some success, I was to be disappointed that the parish records for Dartmouth were not on micro-film, especially when they have such a rich resource of other parish records in their library.

Going up to the top floor of the Library I found a collection of family histories and imagine my delight to find one entitled: A Collection of Notes on the Family of the Hay of Hopes, Haddingtonshire. Begun by Charles Crosland Hay and added to by John Yalden Hay .

My surprise at finding this was compounded as Charles Crosland Hay was my great-great-grandfather.

The book was a mine of information about many of the descendants of Edmond Hay that will keep me occupied for ages, but apart from the reproduction of a portrait of Edmond Hay and another of the First Earl of Tweeddale, the greatest find for me, within its covers, was the transcription of the Sasine of Easthopes from 28th November 1653 (Reg of Sasines, Edin Vol 1 fo 99) that shows that the estate and lands of Easthopes were given to Edmond Hay by the Earl of Tweeddale .

The book seeks to add weight to the belief, in the Hay of Hopes family, that Edmond was acknowledged by his father to be his son. There are examples given, from the Parish Records in Yester, of the Earl’s legitimate children being witness to the christenings of Edmond’s children and of Edmond being witness at the baptism of Jean, daughter of John, Lord Yester, on 9th August 1674.

The weight of evidence is growing in favour of the argument that my mother’s side are descended from the noble line of the Tweeddale Hays, albeit from a possible illegitimate son of the 1st Earl.

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!

So its back to work after the August Bank Holiday and a weekend doing a little family history in between all the other stuff. One of my colleagues at work, who knows that I have been ‘doing’ my family tree, announced today that hearing about my successes she was thinking of setting out on the trail of her own ancestors.

“Where do you start?” she asked.

“With you, of course and then work backwards.” I replied.

If you are new to this and were to ask any good genealogist what to do, my bet is that they are likely to tell you the same “start with yourself first and work backwards” Excuse me repeating it again, but I really would not want anyone to miss this as it is such an important message from the genealogist’s point of view.

Next you should talk to family members to see what they have ferreted away in cupboards, sheds, trunks (what my grandparents called their suitcases!) and not forgetting, in the back of their minds! This is also the time to renew the old-fashioned mode of communication, the one of writing letters to distant relatives; including, where appropriate, a self addressed stamped envelope. If the relatives are distant in miles and live on the other side of the world, well then you may like to try an email. This only works if the relative is on line, more is the shame!

So what advice can I give to my work mate and anyone just starting out?

Here is a five point plan for Family Research.

1. Begin with known facts and work back, each time you obtain a new piece of information, checking it against an original record.

2. Make sure you document your source at each stage and this includes a person or a record!

3. When you turn down a blind alley, keep a record of this research. This should stop you making the same mistake again later on in your search.

4. Don’t assume that anything you have been told or information supplied by another person is correct. Do your own research and check the authenticity of information given to you by others.

5. When you hit the inevitable brick wall then seek help of family history societies or forums on the Internet.

Isn’t the new series of ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ great?

Last week with Patsy Kensit delving into her father and grandfather’s criminal records and going on to discover her ‘honest upright’ folk from Kent that finished walking sticks for a living until the trade disappeared.

Then there was her ancestor the Rev James Mayne, a noble and tireless Victorian curate of St Matthew’s Church in Bethnal Green honoured with a ‘Lambeth MA’; a degree that the programme taught me the existence of for the first time. But what I empathised with here was the Catholic Kensit discovering her Protestant churchman ancestor. I have similarly been intrigued to find that my Catholic maternal grandmother was descended, on her Scottish fathers’ side, from an Episcopalian Bishop! We have to go all the way back to the 1680’s for his birth and to 1727 for the period when he was Bishop of Brechin, then Dunkeld in Scotland, but all the same…a Bishop! Not just a Bishop, but from 1739 to 1743 the Primus of Scotland and all the while the 20th laird of Craighall-Rattray with a castle in Perthshire.

This then echoes some of the second episode featuring Boris Johnson. In his travels he finds he is descended from a German Baron, who’s wife was illegitimate daughter of a Prince with a fabulous castle. In my travels I found that my Scottish ancestors, unlike my English ones, were almost all gentry with the daughter of the Bishop marring a Baronet. I too found other castles in the family, although not of the magnificence of the one Mr Johnson found, but all the same thrilling to me.

I love this family history experience!

What are and where are the National Archives for the United Kingdom?

The National Archives are in Ruskin Avenue in Kew, Surrey which is just on the southern outskirts of London. They were once called the Public Records Office and you will often see the letters ‘PRO’ used as a short name when doing genealogical research. Today you are just as likely to come across ‘TNA’ in your family history researching online and in the written media.

TNA is where the records of the UK central government are deposited if they are considered worth preserving. What is more it is where the records are kept for the English law courts.

While many people will visit the Kew site of TNA, a great many others will go to its website. The advantage of this if you, like me, live a long way from Surrey, is obvious! Within the TNA website is Documents Online, which will allow a researcher to order documents, some to view online and others to be sent by mail.

www.nationalarchives.gov.uk is a website that is quickly developing into one of the best internet resources for family historians as well as for military historians and others. Perhaps it should be said that it is probably not a good idea to use it to start your family history at the moment as it is huge and requires a lot of getting used to.

If you take a look at the Catalogue, you will find that it is not like a library catalogue. At first it seems to be so very complicated and almost perverse in stopping a researcher from finding what one is looking for. The catalogue’s function is to describe and then list in a hierarchical order, all the records that the TNA hold.

Some people may think that they are looking at a catalogue of documents, but it is actually one of ‘records’ as it would be a task of mammoth proportions to describe all the many documents whose home is at TNA. Individual documents fall into categories, which are called ’series’. Series are arranged by the department of government that created them or, in some cases, were the past custodians of the documents.

So if you are to use this resource you will need to understand how the various arms of government worked in the form of which departments are likely to have created the records and how they would have been organised.

There are about ten million descriptions on the TNA catalogue, but they are not all of the same detail or quality. Some are more detailed, especially if the creating government department gave more importance to the record series than others. In the case of the series that is well detailed, in its description, it may even give the searcher descriptions of the documents! But so many others will give little clue as to what is exactly contained in the series in question.

So what have we learnt here?
The catalogue is not a searchable index of documents held at TNA.
It is a searchable index of records, or more precisely descriptions of records that are arranged hierarchically in up to seven stages.

To order a copy of a document to be posted to you will need a note to be taken of the catalogue reference. This reference is in several parts.

The department code, which is between one and four letters, e.g. War office = WO, Home Office = HO

The series description - a number which can be one to four figures
e.g. HO 102

The piece or item number - e.g.WO364/1000

This actually refers not to a document but to a microfilm reel that contains the documents. Here it is armed forces service records from 1914-1920 and in particular for Soldiers’ Documents and Pension Claims, First World War and being the surnames between Desmond, Michael and Davenport, Harry.

If you want more help with the catalogue then I would take a look here: www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/catalogue/about.asp

I have found a great article called “Q & A on the census” in a back edition of the Family Tree Magazine for January 2008.

It gives some back ground as to why, how and where the census were taken. E.g: Did you know that the first one was in 1801? Most people are aware that we can use the 1841 to 1901 census for genealogical research, but census have, it seems, been taken since 1801 to the present day with the exception of 1941 which fell in the World War II period. But only the returns from 1841 onwards have details that are of any good to family historians. The earlier ones didn’t ask for names of all those in the households.

A useful box on the page gives the dates for the returns that we as family historians use. In 1841 it was the 6th June, while in 1851 the census was taken on the 30th March, then the 7th April for 1861, the 2nd April in 1871, the 3rd April in 1881, 5th April for 1891 and the 31st March in 1901.

How were the census details obtained? This question is answered with the following:

“Registration districts were too large to be covered by a single person so were subdivided into sub-districts and these were again divided  into enumeration districts. In rural areas an enumeration district was the area that could be walked in a day by the person (the enumerator) collecting the schedules. In many instances this would be just one village, whereas a large town would be made up of many enumeration and sub-districts.”

It would seem, from the article, that in the week before the census the enumerator would have delivered to the household the form or schedule and everyone that slept under the roof that particular night would have been included in the return even if it was not their regular home. What was interesting for me was the clarification of the instructions to the enumerators.

No person present was to be left out and those not present were not to be included; which I knew. But what if someone was working over night? Well they were to be included on the census return for the house that they would return to the next morning. This does seem obvious now, but it is good to have it confirmed.

Once the schedules were collected and any not filled out were completed by the enumerator asking questions to gather the correct information, the schedules were copied into the enumerator’s book and these are the documents that we can obtain images of on sites such as ancestry.co.uk or findmypast.com etc. today.