The Nosey Genealogist

I’ve put together this short video to explain a bit about Beginning Family History Research.

The web has made the quest to find our ancestors so much easier to do. As more and more data finds its way onto the Internet many more lines of enquiry are opened up to us. But, with this, is the danger of information overload. The new family historian may become frozen in the headlights as the genealogical data juggernaut races on towards them.

Here is some free advice about how to organize your family tree search so that in the long run you save yourself time and quite possibly money. The video also proposes that it is that it is well worth continuing to learn as much as you can about this fascinating subject of Family History by taking courses or reading around the subject. As I have read recently, 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! For beginners advice have a look at my new site here:
http://www.NoseyGenealogist.com

From YouTube…

I love to listen to the professional family historians explaining their various techniques in genealogical research to me. The advice I have had on how to trace my ancestors and build my family tree has, I have come to realise, so often saved me time in doing my own family research.

Genealogy has captured the imagination of a good many of us and as it has the number of websites serving us with databases, or transcriptions, seems to have multiplied like topsy. Sometimes we may not know where to turn and this is especially so if we are starting out. When I first ventured on-line to research my forebears I found some ancestors easy to find on sites like ancestry.co.uk etc. while others seemed to insist on remaining hidden. I hit some brick walls and, where this happened, I put those particular ancestor lines to one side to concentrate on the easy ones to find.

This eventually began to frustrate me. The solution was to learn the tips and tricks that seasoned family history researchers used and so I enrolled on some e-courses. The trouble was that work or other pressure on time would mean that I couldn’t keep up and that I really needed to be able to learn at my own pace when I had a minute or two to do so.

Else Churchill, of the Society of Genealogists, writing in Your Family Tree Magazine, Issue 77, May 2009 says that “The best family historians are those who make an effort to learn about the resources they use and the context in which the records were created.” So I make every effort to continue to learn about this subject that so fascinates me.

Now I will not claim to be any where close to being an “expert”. I am someone who has moved along the line from being an absolute beginner, having picked up some skill sets along the way. I heard recently that some experts consider themselves to be simply “advanced beginners”. This is supposed to reflect the fact that we can all continue to learn more about our subject.

As we gain knowledge, it is also great to be able to share it with others who are just starting out. I have been planning for some time to make available my own simple guide to Beginning Family History on the Internet and to supplement it with some audio podcasts and screen capture help videos. It is now ready for publication as a download resource package. This means that it is distributed in three compressed (or .zip) files from a page within my new website at any time of the day or night. Once you have downloaded it to your computer you can read the pdf manual at your own convenience and listen to the podcasts or watch the video whenever suits you.

Take a look at this link below for what it contains:

http://www.noseygenealogist.com/familyhistorian/index.html

‘Beginning Family History Research: Tracing Your Ancestors on the Web

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!

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.

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!