With Remembrance Sunday just passed yesterday, I guess many of you may have turned your minds, like I did, to where can we find our ancestors who fought in the wars and conflicts that have taken place.
It seems, rather sadly, that it is easier to find records for British service personnel that died in action than the survivors. There is the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, local war memorials and rolls of honour, local newspaper archives amongst other places to find “The Glorious Dead”.
If, like me, you had a father who served in the Merchant Navy in the Second World War, then you can find the details of merchant seamen’s medal cards at the National Archives documents online.
The official journals of the the British Government, the London, Edinburgh and Belfast Gazettes are great places to start looking for promotions, awards of gallantry medals and honours and the details of the commissioning and promotions of officers in the British Army, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force.
Service Records are more difficult to find. A large number of WWI records have been lost to bombing in the Second World War, but as officer’s records were not stored in the same place, you have a better chance of uncovering these. To find a soldier requires the researcher to know the regiment and service number of their ancestor. A tip I read in the Your Family Tree Magazine last month (Issue 96 November 2010) was that as most service men were awarded at least one medal then the name indexes to the medal rolls are a good place to start researching.
Many people often wonder about their family genealogies or about what may have happened to certain people who they were once close to. However, they rarely do anything to find out that information. In some cases, public death records may hold the answers that people are looking for and this article can tell you all about them.
Gaining access to someone’s death certificate may provide you with the information that is required for making a family tree. Additionally, these records can provide you with information that can help you understand what happened to someone who you were close to.
Today, these records can hold a wealth of information about the person who has passed on. You can find out what their recorded cause of death was, who they were married to, and when they were married. You can also find out if they had any children, who the next of kin is, and what they did for a living.
It is possible to get these records by contacting the appropriate state department. However, getting an answer can take a long time and they may only have access to their records, rather than the records for the whole country. It may be better to use an online service instead.
Prior to using a Web service, you should research it to find out how accurate their results are. Unfortunately, all services have not been created equally, so it is important to not spend any money until you’re sure that you’ll be getting the information you require.
To find out which online USA death records service is best for you, you should look for online reviews and specifically search for complaints or class actions that were filed against the company. If you find that a Web service has tons of complaints, you should avoid it.
Those family historians, who are researching their family trees back before the start of the census collections in North America, will be aware that they have to find some alternative records sets to find their ancestors. So what suggestions can we make?
Luckily I was reading up on this subject in last month’s Your Family Tree Magazine.. Issue 96 November 2010.
The article points out that first nominal census took place in 1850 in the USA and 1851 in Canada and so for those of you trying to find ancestors from before these census took place, then the best option available to you is to use the tax records.
What you are quickly going to find is that mostly only adult males are going to be listed in these records. Questions to consider are what age did a person have to be to be included in the poll tax and also what type of property were subject to tax? Best advice is to check out the relevant government regulations so that you can interpret accurately what the data is revealing.
Regretfully there are very few records of these taxes online, but Cyndi’s list is a good place to find links when they exist. www.cyndislist.com
Here you should find links to Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia.
Have you ever wondered how a website like findmypast.co.uk goes about scanning the information for us family historians to use before they put up online?
I mean what do they have to do to actually extract all that information from the government documents so that eventually we can go online and type in our search criteria and then get to see the results?
I watched this film and was fascinated by the facts…
There are 18 million pages of the 1911 census of England & Wales.
36 million people made up the population then, just before the First World War.
10 times the number of images than the 1901 census.
A team of 350 people worked on the transcriptions.
7 billion keystrokes were made by the transcribers!
2 Kilometres of shelving housed the 1911 census before the process of scanning started.
Watch it here.
Disclosure: Compensated Affiliate of findmypast.co.uk
Don’t forget how useful finding old newspaper articles can be when researching your ancestors. There are several online now and they can be a great resource for family historians.
But perhaps your ancestor’s life was not important enough to make it to the nationals? Well have you considered looking in the local papers? I’ve read a fantastic article about one of my ancestors, written at the time of his retirement and published in the local newspaper.
As many of you know I am particularly interested in the county of Devon, as so many of my paternal line comes from that county of England.
One of the biggest problems for me is that the number of Parish Registers on-line does not seem to be as great as for many other English counties. So here is some good news that I recently found on a trawl of the news sites..
Over 360,000 Devon baptism records have been published on the FindMyPast web site in the past month.
You are able to now search for your Devon ancestors in 363,015 new parish baptism records on findmypast.co.uk and these baptism records cover the period between 1813 and 1839.
It would seem that the Devon Family History Society has supplied findmypast.co.uk with these records, for which we should all be grateful. I know that I am!
Here is a link to the site, but first a warning to all those of you that don’t like the idea of promotion for compensation. This is an affiliate link for which I will be compensated if you decide to join!
A first for Ancestry.co.uk (Link is a compensated affiliate link) is their newly published “Prison Hulk Registers and Letter Books, 1802-1849″Â This record set contains the incarceration records of nearly 200,000 people locked up in giant floating jails known as prison hulks.
The convicts’ records that are physically stored away in The National Archives in Kew, provide us with a fascinating insight into the Victorian criminal underworld and conditions aboard the Dickensian ships, which were created to ease overcrowded prisons.
Prison Hulks became an all to common place means to intern criminals during the 18th century. This was a time when many warships, previously used in naval conflicts were being decommissioned and then converted into huge floating prisons. Some of the ships that feature in this fascinating collection include HMS Bellerophon that saw action during the Napoleonic Wars, HMS Retribution, from the American Revolutionary War and HMS Captivity, a veteran of the French Revolutionary Wars.
The records Ancestry have put online, can show you who were imprisoned on these hulks and detail each inmate’s name, year of birth, age, year and place of conviction, offence committed, name of the hulk and, somewhat fascinatingly, character reports written by the ‘gaoler’ that provides an intriguing insight into the personality of each convict.
A an example, the entry for one Thomas Bones recalls that he was ‘a bold daring fellow, not fit to be at large in this country’, while the record for George Boardman explains ‘this youth has been neglected by his parents and been connected with bad company’. William Barton’s record simply reads ‘very bad, three times convicted’.
As well as featuring murderers, thieves and bigamists, the records also reveal examples of rough justice. Several eight-year-old boys were imprisoned on the hulks, as was 84-year-old William Davies, who was sentenced to seven years imprisonment for sheep stealing and later died on board the hulk HMS Justitia.
Click this image to go to ancestry.co.uk. -Â Disclosure: Compensated Affiliate Link.
Sometimes we just need to accept that not every answer to your family history questions will be on-line. I’ve discovered this with my research into my British Family Tree, but it can be the same where ever it is in the world that you are looking for ancestors. You’ve searched for an ancestor using the various on-line tools and failed to find any trace of them?
The temptation is to believe that, because they don’t appear where we think that they should, that we are simply not going to find them. Well, what I need to remind myself when I am on the trail of my UK forebears, is that not every record for Britain is on the web and even for those that are mistakes have been made and omissions may have occurred.
Anyone with a British Family tree is well catered for by the availability of paid and free look up websites.
Taking, for example, my family tree in England. My 4 times great grandparents, John and Sarah Thorn for whom I had obtained their names from the baptism information that I had got from a search of the International Genealogical Index at familysearch.org for their son, also called John, my 3x great-grandfather.
Baptismal font St. Saviours, Dartmouth, Devon, UK.
Remembering what the family history professionals teach, that you should always use information that has been transcribed as a finding aid only – using it to seek out the original record, I visited the Devon County Record Office in person and looked up the microfiche copy of the baptism of John Brampton Thorn in St.Saviours church, Dartmouth on the 28th September 1794.
Having verified that their names were correct, on the IGI, I had then searched for the marriage of John and Sarah. I knew that a number of their children were baptised in the same church and that there was only one other possible child christened earlier than my great-great-great-grandfather in St Saviours in 1790, however it was not certain if this individual was of the same family of Thorns. I was hunting for a marriage around 1794. Frustratingly, there were no likely candidates in that particular church.
Searching the IGI around the area came up with nothing and so I expanded it outwards. With my “possible parish” list IÂ searched on-line for the marriage and came up with some in Exeter for 1793. Were the Thorns from Exeter? Well the answer turns out to be no!
Visiting, in person, the Devon Family History Society in Exeter I explained about my brick wall and the staff looked at their data for marriages 1754 to 1812 for a John Thorn marrying a bride called Sarah. At this point I had no maiden name for Sarah. After a few minutes, for the bargain price of only 15 pence I was handed a list of seven marriages. The very first of which was a John Thorn and Sarah Branton married on the 12 January 1794. The bride’s surname was to become the second name of their child and my 3x great-grandfather. The parish was not Exeter, nor anywhere from around Dartmouth, but Plymouth Charles!
Having obtained this information off-line I then went back to the internet just to check if I could have found it there. On the IGI there was no record and various other websites I went to all returned no matches either.
The lessons I learnt here, is that not every record is accessible on-line. Remember this in your family history research.
I put up an online survey to find out what major brick walls people had in British Isles ancestor research and the largest cry that came back was the following:
Help me with my family tree research, especially back before 1837.
Perhaps this resonates with you? You’ve traced your forebears back in the census collections as far back as the 1841 census? Then you have used the Births Marriages and Deaths on the web and found that the nice and easy indexes only go back as far as 1837?
It was, you see, that in 1837 the General Register Office was set up for England and Wales and took over the registration of vital records from the Church of England.
In Scotland it was in 1855 that the General Register Office for Scotland took the same powers from the Church of Scotland. So from those years backwards we all have to use the records kept by the state church and these are known as Parish records in both jurisdictions.
Baptismal registers will normally give you the name of the child and that of its father, plus the date of the christening. Occasionally you may also see the mother’s name, most particularly if the child was illegitimate. In this case you could see the terms “base born†“bastard†or “natural born†on the record. Sometimes the godparents or witnesses also appear. This all goes to show how there was no standard format to baptismal registers until in 1812 Rose’s Act became law in England and Wales and standardised the information to be recorded on specially printed registers. It should be noted, however, that Rose’s Act did not apply to Scotland or Ireland. These new standardised registers asked for more details than before and so now the clergy had to obtain the mother’s Christian name, the father’s occupation and his abode.
Churches kept parish registers locally. They were not collated or sent to any central depository but were retained by the churches themselves. From the 16th century up until 1837 the parish church carried the responsibility of collecting records of its parishioners. While baptism was more important to the church than actual birth dates and burials were noted as opposed to deaths, the church was essentially an arm of local government.
A strong lockable box, known as the parish chest and into which were deposited records were kept. We refer to all those records, that may now be found deposited in the county record office but were once in the keeping of the parish church, as Parish Chest documents. They don’t just include the well known parish registers of baptisms, marriages and burials of our forebears. You will find there are all sorts of other records that together are sometimes referred to as the parish chest.
In England and Wales you have the vestry meeting minutes while in Scotland you have the Kirk Sessions. There are also odd records such as the report of the parish surveyor! Many of you may not have even heard of such records that may just contain your ancestor’s name and if you are restricting your searching to the online environment then you are more than likely frustrated by the inability to locate them.
In most cases you are going to have to visit the county record office to get to see microfiche copies of these English and Welsh records, as they are not online. For the baptisms, marriages and burials you could go to your local LDS centre and order the films there. Scotland’s old parish registers, however, can be accessed at the ScotlandsPeople website for a fee. Oh that we could do the same south of the border!
Ancestry.co.uk -         (Disclosure: Image is a Compensated affiliate link)
Ancestry.co.uk has launched online the England and Wales National Probate Calendar, 1861-1941 – an index to more than six million wills proven across the 19th and 20th centuries.
Ancestry has said that the combined value of the 6,079,000 estates in the index reveals a fortune that today would be worth more than £20 billion! On the flip side, however, the average value of our ancestors’ estates is a rather modest £3,400.
Now not all of us will be able to find our ancestors in this collection, but if you are lucky enough to do then they can be wonderful resource for family historians. The value of the index is that each entry may also include the name of the departed, the date and place of your forebear’s death, the name of the executer and also, in a few instances, bequest recipients.
So what is Probate? This is the term given to the court’s authority to administer a deceased person’s estate and including the granting representation to a person or persons to administer that estate.
It was in 1857 that the Court of Probate Act came in to force and with it the power to administer estates were transfer from the Church of England to the state. It is the probate calendar books, in which are summarised and collated annually the grants, that are now to be found on Ancestry.co.uk.
Ancestry.co.uk International Content Director Dan Jones comments: “The probate calendar books provide countless new leads for family historians to explore as they move beyond being about family members to long-gone fortunes, mysterious beneficiaries and valuable objects – all with connections back to our ancestors just waiting to be explored.
“Anyone able to find an ancestor in the probate calendar books will be able to find out a great deal about how their ancestor lived, what they bequeathed and to whom – meaning we will be able to find out so much more about what their lives would have been like.â€
All wills and administrations were proved in England and Wales however the places of death vary enormously and include more than 107,000 people who died in Scotland, around 20,000 in France and 18,000 in the USA.
To take a look go to Ancestry.co.uk (Disclosure: This is a compensated affiliate link)
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