The Nosey Genealogist

My family history research in the county seems to indicate that there are limited number of nonconformist chapel burial records surviving for Devon. Enshrined in the law of the land I believe, is the concept that people of any denomination may be interred inside their parish churchyard. If the deceased was a nonconformist then the family members were not allowed to have the Church of England funeral service at the graveside.

In my family some of the Thorns seemed to have left the Church of England and become Presbyterian. By the time, however, they died they were buried in the Longcross cemetery above Dartmouth in the area reserved for St Saviour’s Parish. Does this mean that they returned to the Church of England or not? I am not entirely sure as I think the area that they were laid to rest in was not consecrated ground. This would point to them not being C of E.

The whole subject of nonconformity has led me to discover this about how officialdom treated the issue. Although none of my line seemed to have been Councillors, or the like, the following is still an interesting insight into how the other Christian denominations were viewed.  Members of the “establishment” e.g. local councillors as well as some officials weren’t allowed to have on their robes of office, or mayoral chains etc., while attending the funeral of a nonconformist councillor. If the official took no notice of the rules then they would face a penalty of £100 plus they would be barred from public office for the rest of their lives.

Regarding being laid to rest alongside those of the Church of England, many nonconformists decided on an alternative solution because they did not want to be buried within C of E owned land. Quakers particularly opened their own burial grounds and each marker stone was quite plain and modest often displaying simply the initials associated with the departed. A few chapels for example Independents, Methodists as well as Baptists developed their particular burial grounds and additionally in some country districts burial grounds were established for all non conformists and not necessarily restricted to one religious belief.

From 1880, however, a change to the law by an act of parliament meant that on being interred within a Church of England parish graveyard that the family members were able to choose a minister of their own faith to preside over the burial service. This begun to make the use of distinct nonconformist burial grounds less favoured due to the fact that in some instances they ended up being some miles at a distance from a village or neighbourhood. In 1853 following the considerable overcrowding involving graveyards and burial grounds after the cholera deaths and large number of deaths in Victorian England the parliament approved an additional law shutting numerous churchyards and burial grounds. This led to quite a few neighbourhoods and bigger parishes creating what most of us know as cemeteries. I wish you good luck in your family tree investigations if, like me, you have some nonconformist in your line and hopefully very few brick walls in your family history research to slow you down.

Ideally those with local information for the area in which you are looking might be able to locate a few of those older burial grounds. But the overall scarcity of registers regarding the subject matter might most likely make it difficult if you want to look for names.

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!

I just love how the world wide web helps me with my family history research. Apart from the obvious benefit of being able to use the various genealogical sites such as Ancestry.co.uk, Ancestry.com, The Genealogist, Genes Reunited, the Origins Network, to name but a few, the other great benefit of living in todays technologically linked world is that by publishing my own family tree research within my website www.nicholasthorne.com (to which this blog is linked) I have had the delight of being contacted by people who are either distantly related to me or who are able to fill in blanks in my own research!

I’ve had people who have researched a line way back into the misty pasts, contact me with fascinating documents showing links to Scottish and European Royalty. People who are more closely related as “cousins” several times removed and even people who, coming further up to date, are the present occupants of the building where, back in the 1970’s, my parent’s once had a boat built. I consider this latter information to fall into my own family history as it concerned a chapter in both my parent’s and my own life even if only 30 odd years have passed and in this time the boatyard has gone out of business and the yacht has been sold on twice.

It is all part of the exciting possibility to draw like minded people together that Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s invention provides. So I recommend that once you have some family history facts that you have checked, or if you have some questions that you need answering, a simple web presence will do wonders for you. It doesn’t mean that you will gain hundreds of contacts over night. But I’ve found that over time, however, I’ve had some interesting contacts that I would never have had otherwise.

I love the world wide web!

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 was talking to someone recently who asked me to show them how to use Ancestry.co.uk to find their ancestors.

Now, like many people who have done a bit of family history research, I take it for granted that others can find their way around that site and with a few clicks start building their own family tree. It was only when my friend started asking me for a written list of what pages to go to and which things to click on that I realised that, to some, it doesn’t seem that easy.

I decided to use a really useful piece of software that I have on my PC called Camtasia and record the exact pages and the clicks on them that I would make if I was starting out in populating my family tree. My friend now had a short video to watch rather than the written list of pages they had expected. I know it is so much easier to ’show’ than to ‘tell’ and so I got to thinking that if I burned my video onto CDs then maybe others might like to get their hands on them.

I have teamed up with The Printed Word Bookshop www.JerseyBookshop.co.uk to sell this first disc for £12.50 plus postage. If you want a copy just go here:

http://www.jerseybookshop.co.uk/promotions.htm

I have written to The Generations Network who own Ancestry and they have given me permission to use their website in the demonstration so I am ready to go.

When you get hold of a copy and watch the screencast you will see me trace my grandfather in the 1901 census, find his birth in the BMD indexes on Ancestry and more. I may make more of these help videos, so watch out for more information in the future.