The Nosey Genealogist

I’ve been busy recently creating and promoting a new venture, so I haven’t posted on the blog for some time. You see I’ve got a resource report called Beginning Family History On Line that I am selling from my website www.NoseyGenealogist.com

One of the ways I drive traffic to the new site is to write articles and submit them to article directories. It struck me that this one is worth posting here to for my blog readers too…

Researching a Family History on the Internet.

Delving into our ancestry on the Internet has become one of the most popular pastimes in the 21st century. Not so long ago, however, the family history researcher, intent on tracing their family tree, would be faced with having to plan several visits to various libraries, record offices and, perhaps, some family history centres. Now, even though for the serious genealogist this is still an important part of family history research, the exponential growth of genealogy websites with searchable databases has made it possible to do much of the footwork researching our ancestors online. From the amateur, trying to find an elusive ancestor, to the professional doing a family genealogy project for a client, resources such as those provided at www ancestry.com or co.uk and a host of other providers have made life so much easier for us. The sheer volume of information already made available is being added too all the time with new releases of old records and indexes. There are sites offering us access to census collections, parish records (church records of Christenings, Burials and Marriages), monumental transcripts, BMD sites providing data on births, marriages and deaths, family history societies, old maps, genealogical resources such as parish registers, old town or trade directories and so on.

In the UK the1841 census records are the earliest to be found on-line and now sets are available to search on the net right up to the census of 1911. Census records are available on a host of commercial sites, most of which require you to pay-as-you-go, or to take out a subscription of some sort. You will typically be able to search transcripts and then pay to view actual images, of enumerator’s books, for the various censuses taken every ten years between 1841 and  the 1901 census. Lately, the 1911 census for England and Wales has gone on line earlier than the normal hundred years before release. This is under a Freedom of Information ruling but the sensitive data as to mental state has been blacked out. The unusual feature of this collection is that, for the first time, we can view an image of the household’s return, not just the enumerator’s book and so can see our ancestor’s handwriting.

The availability of the various types of family history data, on-line, has encouraged an ever-growing number of people to make a  foray into the world of genealogy websites. Most are trying to find out who their ancestors were and what they did. Quite a few people have been encouraged to begin looking for themselves after the success of the BBC’s series called: Who do you think your are?
They may be encouraged by the many books on the subject, the various magazines on the newsagent’s shelves and the family history events, such as the annual show at Olympia and a host of others held up and down the country all year round. But while some research is easy, a good few of our ancestors are frustratingly difficult to find and so often a beginner does not know where to turn.

There are still many people, out there, who simply do not know how to even take the first steps to doing their family research on a computer. Then there are others who, having made a start, do not know how to get past the inevitable brickwall that they have encountered.

Brickwalls can be frustrating, but when you find a way to smash through the logjam it can be immensely satisfying. I have learnt how to do this, for some of my ancestors, by taking e-courses in this fascinating subject. What I have discovered is that the family historian needs to be made aware of the various tips and tricks to using the Internet resources to best effect. While the easy information can be obtained by using the straight forward search box on a website, to find elusive ancestors may require a certain application. The good news is that someone has probably come up against the same sort of problem as you are having and so a means of working around the difficulty may already have been devised. For example, I was taught how to use the freeBMD website to locate missing siblings of one of my grandmothers.

Many researchers will have used the LDS or Latter-day Saint’s familysearch.org site. Finding your ancestors, by using the search tools provided by the site, can be difficult; even if they are included in the International Genealogical Index, which is not always the case! The problem is that a 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. A search of the whole of Britain is overwhelming, unless you have a rare name. What if, however, you are looking for a Smith or a Jones? I have learnt how to use a tool provided on a website to search the IGI batches and it is really easy to do, once you know how.

The world wide web has made researching ancestors so much easier to do. As more and more data finds its way onto the Internet many more lines of research are opened to us. But, conversely, there is the danger of information overload. The new family historian may become frozen in the headlights as the data juggernaut races on towards them. My advice is to carefully log your research at each stage, so that you know the blind alleys that you have gone down and the various people that you have researched mistakenly, as well as the ones you have had success with. In the long run you will save yourself time and quite possibly money on certificates bought, or pay-as-you-go searches on the Internet. Next tip, is that it is well worth continuing to learn as much as you can about this fascinating subject by taking courses or reading around the subject. 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!

I had got nowhere with this ancestor’s birth, marriage or death - on or off-line - then a chance revisit of a fhs website and an hour or two looking at the transcripts and a brickwall in my family history research came tumbling down! Together, this and the thinking of spelling variations of names opened up a new line to me.

My paternal line in Dartmouth, Devon, UK has always been a bit frustrating once the census records ran out (1841 being the earliest on line) and I had to start looking at parish records and so on. I had worked out that my three times great-grandfather was called John Thorn and from the information given in the census collections I knew that he had been born in about 1795. His wife and my three time great-grandmother, Elizabeth, was born in about 1799 or 1800.

I don’t have the luxury of living near Dartmouth, or even visiting the area that much, so I am somewhat hampered in researching these ancestors in their own locality. I had decided that a trip to the Devon Record Office, in Exeter, was probably going to be necessary. As my family have migrated away from Devon, however, while relations that still lived in the county when I was a child have since died, most of my UK breaks take me much further north to the East Midlands.

A recent trip to London gave me the opportunity to go to The Society of Genealogists in Goswell Road, EC1. As a member I am well aware that they had a good collection of Parish Records on microfiche on the lower floor and also some transcripts in one of the other reading rooms, on the middle floor.  Unfortunately for me, on this visit, there was nothing in the microfiche collections of parish records for Dartmouth. There was, however in the Middle Library, a selection of Devon Family History Society booklets of the marriages of some of the churches in the town, including St. Saviour’s Dartmouth.

Perusing this book for any likely Thornes, or Thorns, I noted down that on the 13th day of April 1817 a John Thorn married an Elizabeth Sissell.

When I returned home with this tentative lead, I hit the Internet. I was looking for any evidence that may indicate if this was the marriage of my ancestors. I went to the website of The Dartmouth Archives,  www.dartmouth-history.org.uk and found that this voluntary organisation dedicated to the research and recording of the town’s history, had a very comprehensive family history section. Included were transcribed baptisms, burials, marriages and census records. I discovered that I could find the very same details, as I had seen in London, on this really useful niche site. The page I had found began in 1586 and ran to 1850!

There again was the marriage of John to Elizabeth and this time I noticed that the witness were given as John Adams and Sunass (sic) Sissell. I assumed that this last person was a member of the bride’s family and perhaps was her father, but the name Sunass caused me concern.

I am, after doing this family history thing for a few years now, aware that names can be transcribed incorrectly. They will have been written down as the transcriber had seen it and not changed by them to conveniently fit in with what they would consider to be correct. I also wondered if both the first name and the second had been written down not by the person in question, as they may well have been illiterate. When you come to do your own research you should bear in mind this point. The minister may have interpreted the name as he had heard it spoken to him and so in this case “Sissell” could possibly been “Cecil” or something else entirely. As for Sunass? I hadn’t got a clue what that could have been!

While I was on the page of weddings I did a search to see if I could find any other Sissells, the result was a disappointing zero, especially as Elizabeth was born in Dartmouth according to all the census data. Thorns gave me a handful of results, but I have yet to work out any relationships with these names. There were no early enough christening records for John and Elizabeth on the Dartmouth Archives website, but I opened another browser and navigated to the Latter Day Saints (LDS) website or FamilySearch.org and here I did a search for Elizabeth’s christening.

This gave me a lead to a baptism that took place in one of the other churches, St Petrox, in Dartmouth on the 16 of September 1878. The daughter of James and Sarah Sissill was one Elizabeth Gardener Sissill - and here you should note the spelling has changed to Sissil with an “i” and not an “e”. This made me wonder if the witness to Elizabeth’s marriage could have been her father “James” and this has been interpreted as “Sunnas” because a flowing “J” for James had looked like an “S” and the other letters had been misread as well, the “a” as a “u” and the “m” as double “n”.

Now, while still on the LDS site I did a search for James Sissill. The only promising result was for a marriage of a James to a Sarah Gardiner 17 April 1780, not in Devon, but at St Nicholas’ in Gloucester. This time the surname: Sissill was spelt S-y-s-a-l and Gardener was G-a-r-d-i-n-e-r!

So what I am emphasising here is to be wary of names and the way they were spelt. Before more general levels of literacy among the public became the norm, our ancestors relied heavily on a clergyman writing down their names as they sounded. A further search of the LDS site for Sysal or Sissill has not given me James’s baptisim details and so I don’t know where he came from or, indeed, where he died.

I closed the browser open at FamilySearch.org and returned to the Dartmouth Archives site and did a search of the burial indexes that they have uploaded for us to view. In the St. Saviour’s internment area at the Long Cross extension, north of the town, I found Elizabeth Gardner Thorn, a 69 year old widow buried on 25 July 1868 in plot 59 in a walled grave (re-opened) . Also in 59 was John Branton Thorn, a boatman who was 73 years of age when buried on the 15 September 1866.

In the next plot, number 60, I find Henry Thomas Thorne and his wife Ellen who are my two times great-grandparents and who both died in 1908. Can I assume John and Henry to be father and son? More work is required, but at least I now have a lead.

This is all down to finding that the town of Dartmouth has an active family history website and then using the indexes in conjunction with other Internet resources, such as the LDS site. I can now take the names and details further by looking for death certificates for John Branton Thorn and his wife Elizabeth Gardener Thorn, as they died after civil registration of deaths took place in 1837 and trying to get to see more parish records with a physical visit to the Devon Record Office.

The first lesson is that you should always look to see what other research may have been done for the area your ancestors came from and which has been published on the Internet. If you find a family history society, or local interest group with a website, can any of their publications or website pages help you with your quest?

Secondly, be aware of the misspelling of names and keep your mind open to possibilities. In my case I need to think of other spellings for the Sissells or names that may have sounded like Sissell in order that I may trace this line back further.

Nick Thorne

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!