The Family History Researcher Academy has added to their in-depth English & Welsh Family History Course that reveals the best records and resources for searching for your elusive English or Welsh ancestors
“Thank you for your detailed study of English research. I have done a lot of English research, yet much of what you have sent is stuff that people don’t know, so thank you very much for your diligence in putting this together.” S Johnston
“Great series. Will be reading them again as I work on my English ancestors.” J. Gill
I particularly liked the author Rachel’s 5 steps to getting started as they are sensible and follow what I teach in my own English/Welsh Ancestor course
In her online guide she suggests you:
Get (and stay) organized.
Make a Family Tree.
Consider what you want to know.
Talk with your oldest living family members.
Go to census records.
This is sage advice. Much of the focus of the article is towards American records, but she does also widened her horizon to include some British resources.
I also liked the excellent guidelines for conducting oral interviews with a family members that she goes into.
So if you are one of my blog readers from North America and wondering how to start family history research then this is a good place to begin before you make the leap ‘across the pond’ to trace your English or Welsh ancestors.
Want to find your elusive English or Welsh ancestor?
I reveal the many resources you should be using when researching your English/Welsh ancestors in my courses and great value Crib-sheets over at Family History Researcher Academy.
If you want a quick Cheat Sheet to discover where to look for your elusive ancestors take a look at this.
Disclosure: Please note this post contains affiliate links.
This week I provided TheGenealogist with a new article to go with their release of over a million Warwickshire Parish Records in association with the Warwickshire County Record Offices.
The article that I penned is a case history using the records on their website and I have to admit I learned quite a bit about the 18th century theatre – and had a laugh at some of the amusing details that I turned up about the subject’s birth place and her father’s profession.
The marriage was central to her career on the stage. Without marrying in Coventry’s Holy Trinity, she would most probably never have become a famous tragedienne! Had she not, then there would be no statue to her in Westminster Abbey, nor one on Paddington Green.
*Disclosure: Please note this post contains affiliate links. This does notmean that you pay more just that I make a percentage on the sales from my links. The payments help me pay for the cost of running the site. You may like to read this explanation here:
The Family History Researcher Academy (that is also run be me – Nick Thorne) has just put on sale a brand new Concise Briefing crib-sheet. While the new report is a stand alone product it also compliments the in-depth online English & Welsh family history course that has beenavailable for several years from this website.
This Concise Briefing report concentrates on researching in the English and Welsh Parish Registers. It examines the Established Church records, Bishop’s Transcripts and more. Distilled into six pages of great information its aim is to help the researcher understand which resources to use and where to search for your ancestors in these English and Welsh records on and offline.
Learn about the County Record Offices and discover the websites that can help you to find your ancestors in Parish Registers – including those that are free-of-charge as well as others that make a commercial charge, or are subscription based.
This Concise Briefing also reveals:
The background to the English and Welsh Parish Registers.
Where to look for the records.
Whether you can find registers at the actual church.
What Extended registers are.
The report is reasonably priced in either US Dollars, Australian Dollars, Canadian Dollars, New Zealand Dollars or British Pounds. Read more at:
A WWI WRNS [Public domain], via Wikimedia CommonsOn my recent visit to my father I got to talking to him about his mother, my grandmother, and her service in both of the World Wars.
What I gathered from his recollection of her was that in WWII she had been a Leading Petty Officer Wren (WRNS) stationed at Devonport while he was a teen-aged schoolboy. She was living in a flat off the Hoe until the blast from a bomb in one of the raids on Plymouth forced her to find a safer flat on the fringe of Dartmoor. Moving to an ex-nursing home within fifty yards of the Railway station at Bickleigh, with a line into Plymouth, she saw service with the Women’s Royal Naval Service throughout the conflict.
It also transpires that in the First World War, as well, she had served in the dockyard before her marriage to my grandfather in 1918. This opened up my mind to the possibility of doing some research into her time in Devenport.
With this information about her First World War service I was fascinated to find that The National Archives (TNA) have an on-demand webinar (first put online in 2015) that can help researchers understand what records survive at TNA for women who served in the First World War.
I am just back from a visit to Greenwich with my dad who is almost 93 and still fascinated by everything around him.
He had asked my sister and I to organise the trip and the two of us had a lot of fun watching him engage with the ship and its very helpful volunteer guides.
While being educated about the crew and what they would have had to do when serving on this fast sailing clipper, the knowledgeable guide explained how there was a lot of material to search on the Cutty Sark in the National Maritime Museum that is close by. This got me thinking about family history research for those of us that have had Royal Navy sailors or Merchant Navy mariners in our past families.
The National Maritime Museum is part of the Royal Museums Greenwich, that includes the Cutty Sark. There are a number of exhibitions that you can view at the complex, but the National Maritime Museum also houses the Caird Library and Archive.
If you are researching an ancestor then the good news is that this extensive maritime reference resource has free entry – you just need to register for a Reader’s Ticket. At the time of writing (April 2018) the opening hours are:
The National Maritime Museum and Archive is a fantastic and useful resource for finding out about your ancestors who went to sea. They do warn you, however, on their website that tracing people who served or travelled on ships can be a complex task and you may need to consult a range of different resources – their records can help you to search for members of the Merchant Navy and the Royal Navy as well as vessels and voyages but you may also have to back this up with records held elsewhere.
I found that there are a number of useful research guides on their website that can help you in your investigations and a number of links that will point you to useful resources that are housed elsewhere at other archives.
If you, like me, have salt in your blood then this is a facility that you should use.
The Family History Researcher Academy has launched a special 20% off ‘Spring Offer’ on their popular English/Welsh Family History Course and itsavailable only until April 2nd 2018.
Instead of the regular $14 / £11 per month subscription you can now join up for just $11 US or £8.80 Sterling a month. PLUS you get the first month for only $1.00 / £1.00 for you to take it for a test run!
Delivered weekly inside a membership area for 12 months, these modules will reveal the best records and resources that you can use when searching for your elusive English or Welsh ancestors.
If you would like to take advantage of this deal, and discover what records to use, sign up between now and the 2nd April using the special SPRING OFFER link below. You’ll be charged $1/£1 and receive one module a week in the first four weeks, plus some extra bonus reports to help you find your English or Welsh ancestors.
If you like what you see, and decide to stay on, then your subscription for the rest of the course becomes just $11 a month in USD or £8.80 in GBP saving you more than 20% on the regular price. The 20% off and $/£1 trial deal is also available for those who wish to pay in Australian Dollars, Canadian Dollars or New Zealand Dollars – see the offers on the website.
Like to save even more?
To make an even bigger saving, you could take a look at the full payment option of US$94 or £70. This one-time payment saves an amazing $74 / £62 on the full price. You can chose this option from the drop-down tab on the Family History Researcher Academy website.
Family History Researcher Academy Online English & Welsh family history course
Don’t worry about being locked in – subscribers can cancel at any time, with no need to complete the training.
This week I managed to knock down a couple of family history brick walls by keeping an open mind while doing the research.
The successful outcome that I want to write about here was with a General Register Office index. I had been at a loss as to why I couldn’t find the relevant entry for a birth. Very often by using more than just the one website, the difference in transcriptions between them can often allow you a breakthrough. Having used a number of the main subscription websites, however, I had still not found a likely candidate for the elusive person that I was researching.
I metaphorically took a step back and defocused from the narrow search that I was doing for the correct spelling of the person. I looked at the surname and thought: How could this be misspelled by a busy official?
For example Whitman could have been recorded as Witman, Wetman or a host of other spellings. Or the surname Perkin may have been entered with the more common name of Perkins – as I found out while researching someone for an up and coming article of mine. In the case I was looking for to trace a client’s family tree back a further generation, I had a surname which should have ended with a last letter of an ‘n’ but had been recorded with an ‘m’ at the end.
In both cases the transcription on the relevant websites could be said to have been correct as it faithfully reproduced what was to be found on the GRO Index page. In both cases the page from the index had been in handwriting, but I have also seen typographical errors in those that have been typed.
The errors that had momentarily thrown me had been made in the registration process, either when the name had been mistakenly taken down by the local registrar at the time, or when it had been copied at the General Register Office into the official quarterly list.
By thinking about how a spelling mistake could be hiding our lost ancestors, sometimes the answer jumps out at us!
Example of a GRO Index. Crown copyright
The lesson is to think laterally and not get hung up on a narrow thought process that says that this is how it should be written!
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If you’d like to find out more about how to tease out your elusive English or Welsh ancestors then CLICK this link: www.FamilyHistoryResearcher.com/course
Disclosure: Please note this post contains affiliate links.
The following is a Press Release from TheGenealogist at the end of which you will find a link to an article that I wrote for them about a murderous lord of the manor whose burial can be found in these new records.
TheGenealogist has added over 366,000 individuals to their Parish Records for Warwickshire to increase the coverage of this county in the heart of England.
Released in association with Warwickshire County Record Office this brings high quality transcripts as well as images to family historians researching for ancestors in this area.
With 366,260 individuals included in this Warwickshire release, these new records will help family historians to find their ancestors’ baptisms, marriages and burials, in fully searchable records that cover various parishes from this part of England. With records that reach back to the mid 16th century, this release allows family historians to find the names of ancestors in baptisms, marriages and burials.
These new records are available as part of the Diamond Subscription at TheGenealogist, bringing the total to 934,495 searchable individuals for the county of Warwickshire.
Read the article that I wrote for them that reveals the last resting place of a murderous lord of the manor:
62 Falkner Street. Image by Rodhullandemu (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia CommonsThis week on BBC television, here in Britain, there has been the first episode in a fascinating series following the history of the occupiers of one particular house in Liverpool.
A House Through Time is a 2018 four-part BBC documentary about the history of a house at 62 Falkner Street, Edge Hill, Liverpool, England, presented by David Olusoga
Using some of the tools that are familiar to family historians Olusoga is able to discover the story of the first three occupants of the house built on green fields in around 1840.
Watching him use some of my favourite resources – historic newspapers, street and trade directories from the time and the staple records of the census collections – proved to be a case study in doing family history research. It was also good to see contributions from the TV genealogist Laura Berry, whom I once interviewed for my YouTube Channel and who, apart form working on Who Do You Think You Are? series, is also a house historian.
The characters that this episode uncovered were fascinating subjects. From the young customs clerk, living beyond his means with the help of a wealthy father, to the striving servant who managed to climb into middle-class and leave his wife a substantial sum on hisdeath. Perhaps the most interesting, however, was the Cotton Dealer whose life at the house gave way to a spell in debtors prison, before he then acquired a wife and two step-daughters – only to abandon them to the workhouse as he set forth for a new life in the United States.
This former occupier of the house, David Olusoga was able to deduce from the records, was an unsympathetic character. Having lived as a Cotton Dealer in Liverpool and making a living from cotton, picked by slaves, he then became a Coton Dealer again, in America, before joining as a mercenary fighting for the Union Army against the Confederates. Olusoga was seen to be very surprised by this turn of events as he had assumed that a cotton dealer would have had more sympathy with the Southern States and their ownership of slaves.
This TV series promises to be compulsive viewing and I am already looking forward to the next episode. I can’t wait to see how it will use more of the records, that we also work with when looking for our own family stories, to deduce the life tales of the next set of owners of the house in Liverpool.
The most recent episode is available for a short time to viewers in the U.K. here:
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