The Nosey Genealogist

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!

I had gone a little way into my paternal line, with loads more to do, when I just thought I would take a quick look at my mother’s ancestry. My mum died a few hours after I was born in the late 1950’s and my maternal grandmother did much to bring me up.

Grandma would mention her father with obvious pride throughout my childhood but I took in very little about him other than he was Scottish. Now that I was researching family history I was interested in finding out more about this great-grandfather of mine, but sadly my grandmother had passed on by this time. An elder cousin was able to furnish me with an extract of a birth registration for Edward A M Hay that had been obtained several years before, from Edinburgh, by my grandmother. The first surprise for me was that this Scotsman, my great-grandfather was born in Tours, France! He was registered, however, as a British Subject as the son of Charles Crossland Hay and Jeanette Whitelaw Wemyss (HAY).

I now used the excellent website www.ScotlandsPeople.gov.uk and quickly found  that the Scottish records were fantastic and so much more accessible than those south of the border where I was slowly trying to find my father’s ancestors. On ScotlandsPeople I could search the Statutory records, Births from 1855 to 2006, marriages 1855-1932 and deaths 1855-2006 and also the Old Parish Records for the births and baptisms 1553-1854 and banns & marriages 1553-1854. What is more, unlike the English parish records, I could buy images of the documents on line to be posted to me at home. I found the bans of marriage for my great-great grandparents and ordered them up so that, a few days later, the envelope from Edinburgh was there on my door mat. I could now see the place of marriage was at Jeanette’s fathers house in Aberdour, Fife in July 1832 and that Charles was living in Auchindenny House in the parish of Lasswade, Midlothian (Edinburgh).

From them I was able to find their parents. All of a sudden I was off at speed tracing the lines backwards in time. Back to the 1630’s in the case of the Hays!

What was a surprise was that I had found my mother’s Scottish line was of gentry stock, with the odd Aristocrat and an Episcopalian Bishop who was Primus of Scotland for good measure, the further back I went. This started to make it easy once I found Key ancestors as the aristocratic families are well documented on the internet and an especially useful site for me was that of www.Stirnet.com

If you are tracing Scottish Family History I wholeheartedly recommend these resources to you.

Once I had the names of places in Scotland that my forbearers came from I made some time in the Summer to take three days out and visit them. I got to see Castles and houses and the sites of ruins and to discover that I am probably a descendent of a Norman called William da Haya, Cupbearer to King Malcolm IV 1154-1164 & King William ‘The Lion’ of Scots 1165-1214.

http://www.nicholasthorne.com/Three%20days%20in%20Scotland-Introduction.html

Its what many of us dream about, being able to say we are the descendent of someone rich and powerful.

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.

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.

I knew that some of my family were from Dartmouth in Devon and when I set out on this search into my ancestors I did a Google search for one of them called Captain Henry Thorne. I was over the moon to find a picture of the captain at the wheel of the Railway Steamer Dolphin. I think the page has been taken down now but at the time it made me do a second search for a family History Society in Dartmouth.

Once I made contact, I then planned a visit and was rewarded by being introduced to cousins descended from the eldest son of my great-great grandfather!

From this I realised that it is well worth trying to contact FHS in the area that your ancestors lived in.

I’m a bit nosey really, that’s what this boils down to. I am fascinated by who my ancestors were and what they got up to so I decided to start researching my family tree several years back now. I had very little to go on especially when I asked my dad if he could remember his grandfather’s name. He thought for a second or two and told me: “We called him grandpa” !

I’ve subsequently found out how to use Ancestry.co.uk and  have become really quite proficient in finding my way round it. I used the full set of UK census back to 1841 and the Birth Marriages and Deaths until I had got myself back 5 generations of Thornes and discovered on the way that we adopted the extra ‘E’ on our surname in-between the 1871 and 1881 census when my great-great grandfather came back to Dartmouth from working in the naval dockyards of Portsmouth. He returned with a wife and I wonder if it was her influence that the extra letter was attached?

When I started on my paternal grandmother’s line I found myself in Plymouth and some problems with misspelling in transcriptions. One of my ancestors seemed to be called Rover! He turned out to be a Robert, I am pleased to say. This branch of my tree impressed me in that they all seemed to be grafters, working their way up from being mostly small businesspeople to one or two of them living on their own means.

When I turned to my mother’s line I was in for quite a surprise…I shall post about them later.

As I tell people about this journey I am always a little surprised at just how much people are interested in Family History, but often tell me that they find they don’t have the time or the knowledge to do the research. I don’t think it is too difficult for the majority and I wonder if I should put down some simple pointers for people to follow.

Now that’s a thought!