Category: Beginning Family Tree Research

Starting out.

Posted on

New Video Tutorial for English & Welsh family history course

I’ve added some new videos into my online course. You may be interested to read about it here:

 

familyhistoryresearcher.com

 

The Family History Researcher Academy has added another bonus video tutorial into its online English & Welsh family history course.

Now included is a video module that joins with several other short videos to compliment the printed pdf lessons of the course.

The theme of the latest addition to the study material is tracing back to the English or Welsh ancestor from a forebear that emigrated before Victorian times. With so many people sailing away from England and Wales to start new lives in places like North America, Australia, New Zealand and other parts of the world, the tutorial identifies some of the records that you could use to find them in the mother country, pre-1837.

 

Not just for researchers with ancestors who left the country as the new content is also of great use to people whose ancestors stayed. It reviews some of the resources to use when you are researching back further than the 1847 census, or the introduction of civil registration in England and Wales and that is the majority of us!

 

Meanwhile, the weekly downloadable pdf modules continue to be delivered in an online release within a private membership area. These lessons are focused on revealing the resources and records to use when researching your ancestors from England and Wales so that you can break down brick walls more easily.

 

Online English & Welsh family history course

Family History Researcher Academy Online English & Welsh family history course

 

This family history course, having been written from a practical point of view, includes contributions from professional genealogists, online data experts and by its compiler Nick Thorne. Nick has experience of researching ancestors for private clients and of working on various projects for one of the leading British genealogical research websites, including compiling case studies that are published in a number of the U.K. family history magazines.

 

 

What others are saying about the English/Welsh family history course:

“Thank you for your detailed study of English/Welsh 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

 

And this the most recent testimonial:

“Great series. Will be reading them again as I work on my English ancestors.” J. Gill

 

 

The Family History Researcher Academy is available now as a monthly, or as a one off payment.

https://www.familyhistoryresearcher.com/course

 

Send to Kindle
Posted on

Check the source of information on your ancestors

Ancestors Devon Wedding

 

It is so easy to go to another person’s online family tree and just copy the details without questioning if they are correct, because they share some of the same ancestors with you.

We all know that we shouldn’t do this and yet many people still do!

 

I spotted a public family tree on one of the big genealogy sites that had been put together by a ‘cousin’, though I was not aware of them before coming across their tree. My excitement was tempered, however, when I noted that they had attached the wrong person as a spouse of one of the ancestors that I had already included in my own tree.

I had, perhaps, benefited from better family intelligence than they had as to who the married couple had been. This was as a result of the ancestors in question having been included in family stories that I had heard as a child.

 

Seeing a glaring mistake in a published tree shows us that, as we get further away from what we know as a fact (or have a certain amount of confidence about), then we really have to investigate the sources that have been attached to people in another person’s family tree.

Sometimes, however, even this isn’t enough to ensure that we get the correct details in our tree. If the source that we are relying upon is wrong then we can end up adding incorrect material that, on the face of it, looks to be valuable because it includes a cited source.

Nick Thorne 'The Nosey Genealogist' researching for FamilyHistoryResearcher.com

This week I found myself checking some information and looking for a marriage from before 1837 when civil registration began in England & Wales. The only source I could find online was in a Pallot’s Marriage Index on Ancestry. The parish register has yet to been scanned and made available on any of the main genealogy sites, plus there wasn’t even a transcript for this parish to be found.

The first revelation that I discovered from looking at the Pallot’s Index was that when the subject married a known ancestor of mine, she had been a widow. Thus what others had claimed was her maiden name turned out to be her first husband’s surname. This then undoes their next claim that she was born in Ireland on a certain date with the surname that had been assumed to be hers at birth. The other researcher had, unfortunately, made 2+2=5.

I then went searching for her first marriage. The most likely one in Pallot’s is, however, called into question by other transcribed records that put the marriage a full ten years earlier. It would seem that 1828 looked very much like 1818 on the Pallot’s card.

So beware of believing what others claim and always check out their sources. If they haven’t even got a source, then be doubly sceptical of the lead and do your own searches to see if you can find the proof of their claim.

My research this week has also revealed that even cited sources can be called into question. I will have to go back to basics and either, on my next visit to Portsmouth pop along to the Record Office to see the microfilm copies of the register, or take a trip to a LDS Family History Centre to call up the image that I need.

Portsmouth Library and History Centre
Portsmouth Library and History Centre

 

 

 

Learn more about English or Welsh ancestors by taking a Family History Researcher Academy course:

www.FamilyHistoryResearcher.com/course

 

 

 

 

 

Send to Kindle
Posted on

Two people with the same name – so which is my ancestor?

Case study: Two people of the same name, age and living in the same place!

Ellen Malser Thorne
Ellen Malser Thorne

I was looking a bit closer at some of my own ancestors for a change today. Normally I am so involved in researching for other people that I can be accused of neglecting my own family tree. But with a bit of time to myself I decided to take a look again at a branch that had an unresolved question. One that I really needed to sort out, as I last wrote about her in a post back in 2012!

In Victorian Portsmouth I have a marriage of a lady in 1859 into my paternal line with the bride, Ellen Malser, being from Portsea and the groom, Henry Thomas Thorn, from Devon.

In the census of 1861 my 2x great grandmother was aged 28, so suggesting a birth year of 1833. In other census her age points to being born in 1833 or 1834 and confusingly there is another Ellen Malser also living in Portsea Island in the 1851 census who is also born in 1833.

One is the daughter of James and Martha Malser, while the other is the daughter of John and Rosanna Malser. Both James and John are Mariners to add to the confusion.

Probably the two Ellens were cousins. But which one should I have been researching so as to include in my family tree as my great-great grandmother?

 

First Principle: Don’t use only one set of records

To resolve this conundrum I have, of course, to look at some other records to understand more about my Ellen. I turned first to see if I could find the marriage of my great great grandparents and discovered it in the records for Portsea.

Seeking out the image of the parish record held at the Portsmouth Library and History Centre I can see that Ellen Malser married Henry Thomas Thorn in February 1859. Ellen stated at the time that her father is James Malser, a Master Mariner.

Now this record provides her father’s name to add to my tree.

 

Portsmouth Library and History Centre
Portsmouth Library and History Centre

 

Two brides or one marrying twice?

A few years earlier, in 1856, an Ellen Malser married a William Bernthall. At first I had to consider if this was the other Ellen Malser, or had my great grandmother been previously married before she wed Henry?

By turning to an image of the actual marriage in 1859, from the documents in the record office, I can see that she is noted to be a spinster. Taking that information away now points to the earlier marriage being for the other Ellen Malser and illustrates why a look at the original document (or an image of it) can be of great benefit to a family history researcher.

 

Baptism record provides alternative date to the census

From here I now wanted to find Ellen’s birth or baptism, so with the knowledge that she was the daughter of James and Martha I found that the Hampshire Genealogical Society had transcribed a baptism in St. Thomas church, Portsmouth on the 27th May 1832.

Despite the year being earlier than that recorded on the various census, the fact that it reveals that her father, James, was a Mariner and lived in East Street gave me confidence that this indeed was the right woman.

I had already found the Malser family in East Street in the 1841 census where Ellen and her three sisters lived. The other family of Malsers were in another street.

 

When someone vanishes: follow collateral lines

In 1851, however, James and Martha Malser and children seem to disappear. Ellen is now a servant in a house in Portsea Island but her 14 year old sister, Rosanna is still living in East Street. The difference is that only her 70 year old grandfather, Jas Malser is recorded in the household.

With this additional information, at least, I now have a lead to get the family another generation back, as he had not been under the same roof in the earlier count – but now I wondered why the girls parents were not in the 1851 census?

Checking for deaths I have now found that the younger James (their father) had died in 1845 aged 43 and so I have just ordered a pdf death certificate from the General Register Office (GRO).

Where their mother had gone at this stage I have yet to discover. I do know that she ends her days as a patient in the Portsea Workhouse in 1870 aged 70 from a death record obtained from the GRO.

The older James (Jas) Malser is also recorded as being a Mariner in the census, as had been his son, and Jas’s place of birth is Hythe in Hampshire.

Society of Genealogists

Searching at the Society of Genealogists I came across the Trinity House petitions, though they are also at The Guildhall Library in London, and these records can be used to sometimes find a mariner before 1835.

The Corporation of Trinity House was a guild that assisted mariners and their families should they fall on hard times. By the 19th century the guild was awarding pensions to mariners and housing others in almshouses. To receive help mariners had to submit a petition to the Corporation of Trinity House and we are lucky that these survive from 1787 to 1854.

There are two petitions for the name Malser, one in 1822 for a Thomas Malser aged 75 in the Parish of Hythe and another for James Allen Malser, aged 73 in 1851 at… East Street, Portsmouth. This second one is, presumably, Ellen and Rossanna’s grandfather and the first in Hythe, where James had been born, could be their great grandfather (or another relative) bearing in mind the 29 years between the two petitions to Trinity House. I will have to do more research on this new line of inquiry.

The result of using other records and not just relying on a superficial scan of the census, that many are tempted to be happy with, means that I am more certain of which particular Ellen Malser to claim into my family tree. I was also able to then go on to gather leads to get me back another generation, but time has run out and this further research will have to wait for another day!

 

 

I am hoping that this case study has demonstrated why people, who are new to family history research, should try hard to discover what other records are available to help them find their elusive ancestors.

 

Post Script: On my last visit to Portsmouth I went to the area that now houses the Ben Ainslie Racing HQ. It turns out that this was where East Street once stood, but it has long since been flattened!

Old Portsmouth
Old Portsmouth with the BAR HQ in the distance on the left
Broad Street, Portsmouth,
Broad Street, Portsmouth, off which ran East Street

 

Send to Kindle
Posted on

Tracing back to an English or Welsh ancestor.

This post is going to be mainly of interest to beginners, or those who are just starting to investigate their ancestral line that has taken them back to England or Wales from elsewhere.

 

 

Many British people emigrated to start new lives in North America, Australia, New Zealand and other parts of the world.

Perhaps you have discovered that your ancestral trail has now led you to this particular part of Britain and you are now wondering how to find your English or Welsh records?

Some of you may have had ancestors who sailed away from England and Wales to start a new life beyond the seas, or indeed, even in Scotland or Ireland.

Perhaps you have traced your family tree back in your own, or another country, until you have found an English or Welsh immigrant who left before 1837, the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign.

If this is the case then you will not be able to make a great deal of use of the English/Welsh census collections, or of the civil registration indexes to order birth marriage or death certificates for your ancestors. These records begin in Victorian times.

But that does not mean that all is lost, as before this time the Established church (Church of England) acted as an arm of local government and was charged with keeping records of the populace.

Before 1837, baptisms, marriages and burials were kept in local registers maintained by the local parish church and also by some of the nonconformist churches.

Baptismal font St. Saviours, Dartmouth, Devon, UK.
Baptismal font St. Saviours, Dartmouth, Devon, UK.

Many researchers, looking for their ancestors from the British Isles, find that there is a whole lot of information out there on the web for the years back until they reach 1837. Then it just seems to get harder for us with English and Welsh ancestors.

1837 is the year when civil registration started in England & Wales, with the state taking over from the established church the registering of vital records.

You may have been amazed at the ease with which you had found later records of your ancestors on the subscription websites. But then, as you go back before the census records and the government run data for Births, Deaths and Marriages, you will have found that not all of the genealogical records that there actually are have made it on to the internet. Now this situation is getting better all the time with new Parish Record data sets being uploaded to the various big genealogical subscription sites.

As a rule, most original Parish Records can be found in the relevant County Record office for your ancestor’s parish, or in a few cases the incumbent minister may still have retained them at the parish church (if the books are not yet full).

You need to firstly establish where in the country your ancestor came from. A family bible or some other document may point you to a particular part of England or Wales. Look for town and the county that they were born or lived in, as you will need this information in your research. If you can narrow it down to a parish then you are off and running!

 

Assuming that you have found out which county your forebears lived in, how do you decide which parish your ancestors may have been in?

Well this is the value of getting hold of Parish maps for the relevant counties that you are researching. These maps will not only show the boundaries of each parish, but also those of the adjacent parishes, which can be extremely useful for tracking those ancestors who tended to move about!

Phillimore’s Atlas (The Phillimore Atlas and Index of Parish Registers) is the go to resource. Many libraries will have a copy of this or you can find it online at amazon.

The Phillimore Atlas & Index of Parish Registers

 

Parish Registers.

These records are fantastic for family historians to use as recorded in the ancient pages of church registers are millions of people who we would simply never have been able to find where it not for the existence of these parish documents.

We all need to say thanks to the many clergy and parish clerks who had dutifully but, perhaps grudgingly, spent time writing up these entries and recording the precious information on their parishioners as they came to church to baptise their young, marry each other and bury their dead. Yes it was set down in law that they should so do, but we still should thank them for it!

Apparently, until the late 15th century only a small number of people were even remotely interested in the recording of births, baptisms, marriages and deaths.

Those that were would have been mostly from the landed classes of the gentry and the aristocracy for whom knowledge of family descent and line was important. Their interest stemming from having information to do with the inheritance of and the passing on of their land. Who should inherit property meant that the matter of legitimacy needed to be considered by the great and the good!

For the rest of society there was little need for this information, in light of church teaching that people were individually insignificant in God’s Creation. But come the end of the Middle ages, things changed.

The Church became occupied with the blood relationships between parties at a marriage. Marriage between relatives (even those related to you spiritually – such as your godparents) was forbidden by the Church. Certainly it had become most useful to know who you were related to and it was evidently most important for the Church to be able to have this information.

We can thank King Henry VIII’s Chief Minister Thomas Cromwell for requiring English parishes to keep a register from 1538, though many of these early records have been lost to us.

Most of those later ones that have survived are now housed in local diocesan archives, very often at a local County Record Office. Some diocesan archives may be in a neighbouring repository when the dioceses spans more than one county – so watch out for that in your searches!

As is always the case in family history research, you are advised to check the originals, or at least try to look at the microfiche or film copies of originals if you can.

We are lucky in that some of the parish records are being released online, but there are still areas that require a trip to the local County Record Office as not everything is digitised yet – as I found out recently when looking for one of my ancestors from Berkshire!

Send to Kindle
Posted on

Newly Released: English & Welsh Family History Mini-Video-Course

The Family History Researcher Academy has just added a FREE video mini-course for those searching for English or Welsh ancestors to FamilyHistoryResearcher.com

The short video tutorials deal with some of the mistakes that researchers sometimes make when they are looking for their English or Welsh ancestors in census and birth records. The mini-course also sets out some of the places that you could research for your elusive ancestors in and also sets out how to best begin the search of these British records. While the videos encourage viewers to go on to the more detailed written course, the mini-course stands alone in offering some very useful information.

These concise videos and the more in-depth downloadable pdf Family History Researcher Academy English/Welsh family history course were complied by Nick Thorne from his experience of researching ancestors for private clients and working with one of the leading British genealogical research websites for whom he writes case study articles for publication in several of the U.K. family history magazines. He is also the author of this blog “Help Me With My Family Tree” under the pen name of The Nosey Genealogist.

These FREE videos are available now at: www.familyhistoryresearcher.com/free-video-course

Send to Kindle
Posted on

Find out how your ancestors’ lived

Nick Thorne 'The Nosey Genealogist' researching for FamilyHistoryResearcher.com

Discovering more about your ancestry

 

The most satisfying part of family history for me is when I can take some facts, that I have learnt from examining primary records, and then go and see where they took place.

This is often simplest for a baptism, wedding or funeral where the church remains standing to this day. Finding that my ancestor married and then had their child christened in a particular place may cause me to seek it out and lightly touch the font in a salute to my forebears who had gathered around it to watch the clergyman pour water over my ancestor’s head.

 

Baptismal font St. Saviours, Dartmouth, Devon, UK.
Baptismal font St. Saviours, Dartmouth, Devon, UK.

When I find out what an ancestor did for a living can equally have me making a trip to the place where they worked. This can be successful where, as in the case of a man who worked in the Royal Naval dockyards at Portsmouth, the buildings are still there and can be visited as a tourist attraction.

Boatbuilding

 

But it can also be disappointing when all trace of the former landscape has been obliterated by modern development on the site, as in the case of others of my ancestors’ places of employment – not to mention some of their homes.

What I like to do in this case is to see if I can make a visit to a museum that reflects the life of such an ancestor.

 

A visit to properties owned by The National Trust can reveal how your ancestors lived

 

Another excursion that I find useful is to visit several of The National Trust properties.

Hold on! I can hear people saying.

Surely the stately homes are only of interest to those who have aristocratic ancestors?

Well what about those of us that have identified ancestors that worked as staff for the ‘big house’? Some houses allow you to see ‘below stairs’, as well as the fine rooms up above.

 

For those of us that have found ancestors that had to enter the workhouse then a visit to The National Trust’s fine example at Southwell, that I have written about before in a post about workhouse ancestors.

On a recent visit to Birmingham I was able to take a tour around The National Trust’s Back to Back houses. These guided tours take you around the carefully restored, atmospheric 19th-century courtyard of working people’s houses.

These homes had windows only on one side as they were built, as the name implies, back to back with each other. To the rear was a courtyard that also housed the laundry and the outside toilets for up to 60 people to use!

 

What is fascinating, for family historians, is that the first house is dressed to reflect the 1840s. With tallow candles for light, no running water – requiring the teenage daughter to walk ten minutes to the nearest well pump carrying heavy wooden buckets. In this the house of a jeweller and his family we can get an idea of what life was like at the time of the 1841 census for working people that had moved to the cities to find a living.

See what ancestors living in the Back to Back court housing

Another of the houses reflected the 1870s and although they now used oil lamps and had a communal tap in the courtyard,  and the outside privy now flushed rather than being an earth closet relying on the night soil men to carry away the human waste, times were still hard.

Upstairs the four sons slept ‘top and tail’ in a bed. A rough curtain slung across a rope divided the room so that another bed could be rented out to a lodger.

As if this lack of privacy was not enough, in the 1871 census it seems to identify that the house had a second lodger. The suggestion is that the male and female lodgers may well have been ‘hot bedding’ where one person has the use of the bed for the day, while the other for the night!

 

Theses types of windows into our past can really make us think about how our ancestors lived. It also brings home how rich we are now in the Western world that we are fascinated by the hardships of everyday life that our forebears simply took as normal. By using the records that are available to us and then relating them to conditions, that we can learn from studying the social history, enables us to build a better family story.

 

You can learn where to find the records that reveal your ancestors’ lives by taking the English/Welsh family history course. Read more here:

www.FamilyHistoryResearcher.com/course

 

 

Send to Kindle
Posted on

I learn something from every visit to The National Archives

 

The National Archives

I’m just back from a flying visit to The National Archives at Kew.

Every time I visit TNA I get something out of it and today was no exception! I discovered the delights of records that are not available anywhere else to search.

I went along to research several different lines of enquiries, one of which was for an ancestor of mine who had given his profession on his son’s baptism as ‘tide waiter’. This is a type of customs officer who waits for the ships that come in on the tide and then checks them for contraband or goods that are subject to duty. He was in one of the census as a Customs Officer and has appeared as this in some family notes I received from a distant cousin.

My initial research using the Discovery search engine on www.nationalarchives.gov.uk had me confused. A few minutes with the help desk staff on the first floor reading room, however, pointed me towards the microfilms of the CUST 39/3 that are the records for the establishment at the different ports – basically the Staff Lists with details of staff employed by the Board of Customs.

I was able to spool forward to Plymouth, where my man was based and where in the 1851 census he was recorded as a Customs house officer. So if he had been a tidewater then his name would have been entered into the list of the Plymouth establishment. Alas, he was nowhere to be found which backs up my developing theory that he was an ‘Extra Gent’ (not on the establishment) customs officer and that he, or someone else, may have exaggerated a bit on his son’s baptismal record!

 

Ordering up the Customs Books at TNA
Ordering up the Customs Books at TNA

 

I then ordered up some Customs minutes books (CUST 28/199) and looked at any mention of Plymouth and names of Customs officers there. What I came away with was a much better understanding of the records and how,  if you are lucky enough to find your ancestor mentioned you can build a fair bit of colour to your family story. This would especially be true if your Customs Officer got himself into trouble. One of the original 1850s ledgers that I was able to thumb through was the Outport Records: Charges against Officers (CUST 66/217).

 

Customs officers' charge book
Charge Book

 

I didn’t find my ancestor mentioned in the book, but for those researchers who are able to find a forebear then it will be of great interest to them. The thick leather bound books with heavy bluish paper provide a fascinating insight into the discipline proceedings. The various cases are often recorded on the page verbatim. You can thus read the question asked by the Surveyor of the man before him and the answers given by the accused Tide Waiter. At the end you will find the verdict of whether the Customs Officer was to loose his job or not. All of which is written in the neat handwriting of a clerk from 167 years ago.

None of these records are digitized and so it is another example of why a visit to TNA can allow you to get to see records that just aren’t available elsewhere. So while I do a lot of my research online I always enjoy getting out to The National Archives, or a County Record Office, every now and again to delve into those records that are in their safekeeping but not digitized.

 

 

 

Send to Kindle
Posted on

Beware of those family history stories!

Manuscript This week I was researching a case-study to write for a magazine and I came across a local newspaper article that spun a fabulous story about my subject.

I had already traced my man in many of the online records and so I had the basis of my own piece planned and was just doing the usual Google search to see what else was out there.

The story the newspaper had was that the man had put his mother into the workhouse when his father had died. As if that was not extreme enough, he was alleged to have never spoken to her again!

The trouble with this story was that I had already found the death record of the mother two years before the demise of her husband and thus making it an impossible yarn! What was more – the nonconformist minister had very obligingly annotated the entry to supply extra information about the death that I could reveal in my own article. A sad and very different story that I can’t reveal here as its reserved for the advertorial when that comes out around November.

Stoneywell typewriter

 

I once had a client who had been told as a boy that his relative had ‘fallen from his horse’ to his death. This turned out to be a cover for his ancestor dying young in an asylum, something which I uncovered by finding the death index record and then buying the death certificate.

 

Another client asked me to find their great grandfather; who had been an eminent medical man in his time. They knew a fair bit about him, from family stories, but they were actually a generation astray.  When I turned to the actual records I could find that the famous man was not their grandmother’s father at all, but was actually their 2x great grandfather.

 

The moral of these tales are that while you should listen to family stories, you shouldn’t believe everything that you are told and always seek to verify the facts in the records. If possible go to the primary records such as the birth, marriage and death certificates, or the church registers. But always remember that even in these sources convenient white lies may lurk there to throw you off the scent!

People make up stories, sometimes it is to hide something that may have been shocking to our ancestors at the time. The innocent story gets retold and embellished and morphs into something different and gets told over again. Not all these tales will end up being published in the newspapers, but some will, like the mother who was reputed to have been put in the workhouse and forgotten.

There is a saying that ‘you shouldn’t believe all that you read in the newspapers’ – but despite this sage advice a lot of us do just that! We should also keep a healthy dose of scepticism when listening to family accounts. While we should definitely listen to the stories that our elders tell, it is best to check out the details to see if the records back up the story before attaching it to the family tree.

 

I deal with this topic further in my course on English & Welsh family history available online at:

https://www.familyhistoryresearcher.com/course

Send to Kindle
Posted on

Vaccination records reveal English ancestors

Devon Family History Society's Tree House
Devon Family History Society’s Tree House

 

When it proves impossible to find your ancestors in all the usual records online what do you then do?

Declare that you have a brick wall and give up… or think laterally and turn to other records?

I had a problem with researching an ancestor and the answer came from turning to look for collateral lines (brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles) and using one of the lesser known record sets. In this particular case I had to go offline as the record set had not been digitized by any of the main subscription sites.

It is worth remembering that not everything is online, as some of the smaller data sets don’t get used sufficiently by family history researchers to warrant a commercial company buying the rights to put them on the internet.

In this case it was the Dartmouth, Devon Vaccinations Register 1875-1876 that is in the South West Heritage Trust Devon Archive Catalogue that helped me back on track. The register provided me with valuable information that an ancestor’s sister was born on the 1st January 1876 at Smith Street in Dartmouth, gave me her name, Elsie Lilian and her father’s name and occupation together with the date that she had been vaccinated.

I could have gone in person to the South West Heritage centre in Exeter to find this lead but in fact I reached it by making use of a Family History Society’s look up service. Devon FHS have a database of names that appear in the transcriptions that they have for sale and so it was this that alerted me to the entry.

If you are looking for your own ancestors in these registers you can normally find them at the County Record Office for where your ancestor lived (such as the South West Heritage centre in Exeter for Devon in my case) or some copies are at The National Archives in among the Poor Law Commissioners Poor Law Board and Board of Guardians correspondence.

 

Devon County Record Office
South West Heritage Centre in Exeter, Devon (County Record Office)

The Vaccination Act of 1840 made it law that free vaccination against smallpox was to be available to the public and paid for by the poor rates. It was not until the Vaccination Act of 1853, however, that vaccination was made compulsory for children and it then became the responsibility of the poor law guardians to ensure that all infants in their area were vaccinated within four months of birth. While the law stipulated this should happen it failed to give the guardians any powers of enforcement and so they had no means of ensuring that all children were vaccinated. By 1867, however, this was changed and the Guardians were given the right to prosecute parents for non-compliance where parents could be fined and even sent to prison if the fines were not paid.

Guardians were obliged to keep registers of vaccinations and in 1871, they were also required to appoint vaccination officers for their poor law union. The task of ensuring compliance was made easier in 1874 when birth registration was made compulsory and the onus of birth registration being put on parents where as before it was on the registrar.

 

The point to take away here is that when an ancestor can not be found in the records, don’t lose heart. There is always the possibility that their footprints through life will emerge in some other smaller set that you have yet to use.

Keep your eyes open and keep searching, even if you have to come back to them much later on. And take time to learn what other record sets may be available for your ancestors’ county.

 

Good luck in your research this week!

 

Send to Kindle
Posted on

Tip for those new to researching for British Ancestors

When you first start doing Family history research for British ancestors, It may appear to you to be a quite daunting task. There will be probably be frustration and elation often mixed in equal parts as you find a forebear and then lose trace of them again. There are so many avenues for you to go down and so many records to look at in Britain which means that, given time, you can probably get back on track and those ancestors that disappear may reappear later. Not being able to find a person can be the result of many things. The ancestor may just be hidden within the database because somebody has lost the record, or it has been damaged, or simply your ancestor’s details were mis-entered in the first place.

The best bit of advice that I can pass on is some that was given to me a number of years back. It is a recommendation that can be applied to any task, really.

“Tackle the subject of researching for your British ancestry by taking it in small bites at a time.”

Perhaps the first tools to use are:

  • Birth Certificates – these can provide you with parent’s names of an ancestor
  • Marriage Certificates  that give you the father’s names for both parties
  • Census records which, as well as other information, furnish you with the birth places of ancestors and their ages
  • Parish Registers which will, with luck, supply a track for you to follow of baptisms, marriages and burials for your family.

In truth, all of the above records should be used together so that you can corroborate the details. A census may give you a place of birth different from the actual place found on the Birth Certificate because your ancestor, for some reason best known to themselves, wanted to claim a different place of birth from the actual town where they were born. Ages in census may have been given wrongly for a variety of reasons – not the least of which is that some did not really know!

It is vital to start your family tree research from the latest provable fact. This could be your parent’s details, your grandparent’s or perhaps your own birth certificate.

Now I realise that people that have been adopted, or for some other reason are not aware of their biological parent’s names or details will struggle with this. There is an article republished in the resources section of my website that can help you if you are in this position. Take a look at: Finding biological parents

Send to Kindle