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 on the 1890s decade of newspapers.
TheGenealogist has added over 5 Million passenger records to their US records, featuring people that migrated to the USA between 1834 to 1900. The mass movement of people from one country to another isn’t a new thing. The motivation can be economic, political upheaval or religious persecution.
The data covers:
3,956,780 Germans emigrating to the United States between 1850 and 1897
836,122 Italians emigrating to the United States between 1855 and 1900
522,638 Russians emigrating to the United States between 1834 and 1897
Most were drawn to the U.S.A by the attractions of land and religious freedom, after being forced to leave Europe by shortages of land and religious or political oppression.
“From the Old to the New World” shows German emigrants boarding a steamer in Hamburg, Germany, to come to America. Image published in Harper’s Weekly, (New York) November 7, 1874 (Public Domain).
This release joins the millions of US census, death records, trade directories, wills and poll books already available on TheGenealogist.
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TheGenealogist has also added over 500 further editions of the weekly publication The Illustrated London News to their Newspaper and Magazine collection. The latest collection is of newspapers that were published in the 1890s and offer a fascinating insight into your ancestors lives.
The Illustrated London News is one of a number of newspapers and magazines that are fully searchable by name or keywords by Diamond subscribers of TheGenealogist. Not only can this extensive resource add context to your ancestors’ lives and times, these newspapers can be used to find out more about people who were mentioned in reports from the time.As well as notices for baptisms, marriages and deaths, there are also wills, crimes and court cases, plus thepolitical stories of the time.
Read the article that I put together for TheGenealogist which looks at the news of 1890s and the world in which your ancestors lived:
The National Archives, London, England have announced that they are opening up their prisoner of war (WW II) archives. These documents were transferred to The National Archives in December 2014. There are approximately 190,000 records of persons captured in German-occupied territory during World War II, primarily Allied service men (including Canadians, South Africans, Australians, New Zealanders, British and Allied civilians and some nurses. There are also cards for American, Norwegian, Chinese, Arab and Cypriot origins.
The new collection (WO 416) also includes several thousand records of deceased allied airmen whose bodies were found near their downed aircrafts. While these airmen were never prisoners of war, these records act as records of death.
The records are cards—some persons have up to 15 cards, but most have only one or two. It is not catalogued by name of individual for privacy reasons as some may still be living. The National Archives has started to catalogue the entire series and they have opened the records for those who were born more than 100 years ago or if they have proof of death.
For those records that have not yet been digitized you can order the records in advance for when you visit the Kew ( The National Archives) or you can request a quotation for a copy to be sent to you. The price will vary depending on the amount of copying. When you click on the name of the person you are researching , click on details. There you will get a transcription of information they have plus the option to order in advance or request a copy.
Not all service personnel have cards as they were removed from the collection to be used as evidence to support claims by Prisoners of War after World War II. These cards, for the most part, were not returned but may form part of the personnel’s service record which may be held by Veteran’s agency See: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/requests-for-personal-data-and-service-records
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:
Disclosure: Please note this post contains affiliate links.
The latest release from TheGenealogist team this week:
TheGenealogist has added over 1.9 million individuals to its parish record collection covering the county of Sussex. Published In association with The Parish Record Transcription Society, this second release of records for the English county more than doubles the number of parish records available for the area.
Sussex scene from TheGenealogist Image Archive
TheGenealogist now has over 3 million individuals in the Sussex Parish Record Collection.
The new batch covers individual records of:
1,278,413 Baptisms
308,746 Marriages
327,091 Burials
The Parish Record Transcription Society (PRTSoc) have worked with TheGenealogist and S&N to make their records available online. With a combined 3 million plus individuals from baptism, marriage and burial records now fully searchable it is easier than ever to discover ancestors from Sussex by turning to TheGenealogist’s parish records collection.
These records are published as a result of a major project undertaken by PRTSoc staff and dedicated volunteers to transcribe the parish registers of West Sussex with the aim of preserving them for generations to come. By working with TheGenealogist these are now also searchable by online researchers on TheGenealogist.
This release joins TheGenealogist’s Sussex collection including parish records to form a major resource for the county.
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.
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.
Disclosure: Please note this post contains affiliate links.
The latest release from TheGenealogist team this week:
Queen Mary 1936 from TheGenealogist’s Image Archive
TheGenealogist has just released over 2.7 million BT27 records for the 1930s. These Outbound Passenger Lists are part of an expanding immigration and emigration record set on TheGenealogist that feature the historical records of passengers who sailed out of United Kingdom ports in the years between 1930 and 1939. With the release of this decade of records, the already strong Immigration,Emigration, Naturalisation and passenger list resources on TheGenealogist have been expanded again.
The fully searchable BT27 records from The National Archives released today will allow researchers to:
Discoverpotential family members travelling together using TheGenealogist’s SmartSearch. This unique system is able to recognise family members together on the same voyage. In this situation it will display a family icon which allows you to view the entire family with one click.
Find people travelling to America, Canada, India, New Zealand, Australia and elsewhere in the Passenger lists of people departing by sea from the United Kingdom.
View images of the original passenger list documents that had been kept by the Board of Trade’s Commercial and Statistical Department and its successors.
Discover the ages, last address and where the passenger intended to make their permanent residence.
These fully indexed records allow family historians to search by name, year, country of departure, country of arrival, port of embarkation and port of destination.
Those with ancestors who sailed from Britain in the 1930’s will welcome this fascinating new release from TheGenealogist, which adds to their current Emigration records, now totalling over 19 million and dating back to 1896.
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.
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
Learn more about English or Welsh ancestors by taking a Family History Researcher Academy course:
This week the initial tranche has been released, as you can see from the press anouncement that follows.
TheGenealogist has released the first part of an exciting new record set, The Lloyd George Domesday Survey – a major new release that will find where an ancestor lived in 1910. This unique combination of maps and residential data, held by The National Archives and being digitised by TheGenealogist, can precisely locate your ancestor’s house on large scale (5 feet to the mile) hand annotated maps that plots the exact property.
Geo Bone a Coroner’s Officer lived at 12 Kennett Road in 1910. The area has now been redeveloped and the road name reused further north in a new realigned thoroughfare.
Researchers often can’t find where ancestors lived as road names changed over time, the Blitz saw areas bombed to destruction, developers changed sites out of all resemblance from what had stood there before and lanes and roads were extinguished to build estates and office blocks. All this means that searching for where an ancestor lived using a website linked to modern maps can be frustrating when they fail to pinpoint where the old properties had once been.
TheGenealogist’s new release will link individual properties to extremely detailed ordnance survey maps used in 1910
Locate an address found in a census or street directory down to a specific house
Fully searchable by name, county, parish and street.
The maps will zoom down to show the individual properties as they existed in 1910
Complementing the maps on TheGenealogist are the accompanying books that will also provide researchers with basic information relative to the valuation of each property, including the valuation assessment number, map reference, owner, occupier, situation, description and extent.
This mammoth project begins with the first release of the IR91 Index with subsequent releases of the more detailed IR58 Field Books planned. There are over 94,500 Field Books, each having hundreds of pages to digitise with associated large scale IR121 annotated OS maps.
The initial release from TheGenealogist is for the City of London and Paddington maps with their index records. Future releases will expand out across the country with cross linked maps wherever they are available.
Mark Bayley, Head of Development at TheGenealogist says:
“With our English & Welsh Tithe Map collection, we’ve become known for our map based records and this new collection makes a fantastic later addition. The maps show an incredible amount of detail, allowing you to zoom right in on the hand annotated property. The records that go with these maps are just as detailed, allowing you to find out all manner of information about your ancestral home.”
The National Archives issued the following statement:
“The Lloyd George ‘Domesday Records’ form essentially a census of property for Edwardian England and Wales. The innovative linking of individually searchable property data with associated annotated Ordnance Survey maps will be of huge value to family and local historians alike.”
Case study: Two people of the same name, age and living in the same place!
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
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.
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 with the BAR HQ in the distance on the leftBroad Street, Portsmouth, off which ran East Street
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