The Nosey Genealogist

Its been a long time since I posted due to being away on holiday and then coming back to a mound of work, but here is the first of some new posts.

While away I was able to go to Kew and The National Archives. The aim of the trip was to familiarise myself with the place as any serious Family History Researcher is going to have to use TNA at some point in their genealogical searches. I had looked at the website http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ many times before. This time I was planning my first visit to Kew and so I determined what I was going to look for when I got there. I wanted to try and find my great-great-grandfather’s baptismal records in the nonconformist registers.

The current investigation of my paternal line, the Thorne’s or Thorn’s of Dartmouth (if you have read my previous post you will know that Thomas Henry added an “e” to our surname in the 1850’s) has shown that g-g-grandfather THORNE was buried in the churchyard of the CofE church of St.Saviour’s, Dartmouth and that he married g-g-grandmother Ellen MALSER in St.Mary’s CofE church in Portsea, Portsmouth. His parent’s, John THORN and Elizabeth SISSELL seemed to have married in St.Saviours in April 1817 but I could not find the Christening of Henry in St.Saviours even though there were other children of John and Elizabeth baptised there.

The answer seems to be that for a period of time the family left the Established church, as from 1826 to 1836 and every two years between these dates, a Thorn was baptised in the Presbyterian Chapel in Dartmouth! This included Henry Thomas Thorn, my g-g-grandfather.

How did I find this?

Well I had used Hugh Wallis‘ site to identify the records and give me the dates (http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~hughwallis/

IGIBatchNumbers.htm#Menu

)

Then on TNA’s website I used the catalogue to find Word or Phrase: Dartmouth and Department or Series code: RG - which is the Records of the General Register Office, Government Social Survey Department, and Office of Population Censuses and Surveys.

This gave me the answer that DEVON, Dartmouth (Presbyterian) Baptisms were at: RG 4/959 and could be accessed at TNA in Kew.

So when I arrived I was able to go to the banks of draws containing micro film, select the correct one and go to a microfilm reader and scroll through until I found my g-g-grandfather and some of his siblings!

It should have been easy, but I got side tracked and as it was unfamiliar to me with so many interesting things that could be looked up, it took an age longer than it did the next time I visited.

Oh yes, I got hooked and had to come back another day. But that is a story for another post.