The Nosey Genealogist

If, like me, you have searched for hours to try and find an ancestor’s birth, marriage or death with no luck and wondered if it is something that you have been doing wrong, then just consider the following list that I was introduced to recently while doing a course with Pharos Tutors to make me a better family history researcher.

• Wrong registration district – are you looking in the one that you assume your ancestor should have been registered in? Think about looking in neighbouring districts as they may be found there instead. You may not know, as I didn’t, that early registrars were paid by results and that they were responsible for gathering the information. Later the responsibility was transferred to the public to register births, marriages and deaths.
• Looking in the wrong year. You may have been given the ‘received wisdom’ that great-great grandfather was born in a particular year. Did you know that professional probate researchers, that give evidence in court, will look for a person up to 100 years of age when searching for a death. Will look for a woman’s marriage up to the age of 100! Search up to 25years after marriage for the birth of a child and keep in mind that some people may marry several years after a child was born.
• Wrong name – Could you be looking for the middle name instead of the first? Many people are known by a second name rather than their first so a John Alan Smith may have been called Alan Smith all his life. His name may have been spelt Allan, or Alun so watch out for spelling variations. Be aware that people may be incorrectly indexed or spelt differently. Also they may have reverted to a previous name after the collapse of a marriage.
• Family stories that send you off on a wild goose chase like looking for the handsome Irishman in one branch of my family that all seem to be from Devon, with the exception of a small bit of Cornish that crept in.
• Inconsistent searching. Not recording what you have already done, many of us may hold our hands up to this!
• Simply your ancestor was not registered. This may occur especially in the early years after the introduction of civil registration in 1875 but should be more rare after 1875. In between 1837 and 1875 some districts were under registered.

I hope this helps some of you, it certainly has for me as I have some elusive fore-bearers whom I am still trying to locate using Ancestry and the excellent FreeBMD on the Internet and had lost my way until I did the course and realised that I should think around the problem more than homing in on what and where I thought these ancestors should be.