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.

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