The Nosey Genealogist's: Help Me With My Family Tree
British Family Tree Research, Tips, Techniques and News
I caught up with Anthony Adolph, the professional genealogist and author on the Genes Reunited stand.
I asked him if he would give us a few tips for family historians.
Anthony has written the lesson on Aristocratic ancestors for my Family History Researcher course (click the banner ad to the right if you want to join) and his book Tracing Your Aristocratic Ancestors is available from Pen & Sword online.
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I’ve been looking back at an ancestor’s will this week. These family history records are fascinating. Seems that one of my two times great grandfathers left a little money and his house to his wife. In his life he had changed occupations from being a Hatter in Tavistock to being a grocer in Plymouth and it makes me wonder about the economic and social forces at work which made him chose this path.
Another ancestor, on my mother’s family side, seems to have cut his eldest son out of the will, everything being inherited by the children who were next in line! What was the story there, I wonder?
These wills, however, are from the start of the records created by the Probate Registry, which took control of proving wills and administrations in 1858. Before this, four different types of ecclesiastical (church) courts dealt with these cases.
Ancestry.co.uk has recently published online over a million probate records, featuring the last will and testament of some of histories most famous names including William Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Sir Francis Drake.
Ancestry bill this as being “the most comprehensive UK collection of its kind available to view online”. Certainly I have found that other providers give access to these records on their own sites, for example The National Archives on Documents Online and TheGenealogist.co.uk has a substantial collection of Wills and Will indexes available online, including the index of the Court of York and full Wills for the Court of Canterbury.
The England and Wales, Prerogative Court of Canterbury (PCC) Wills 1384-1858 covers nearly five centuries worth of history and details how much people owned and who they left it to.
Up until January 1858, the church and other courts proved wills in England and Wales. The PCC was the most important of these courts and was responsible for the probate of wills where the value of assets was greater than five pounds, equivalent to £526 today.
Searchable by name, probate date, residence and estimated death year, each record contains information about the final assets of the deceased. Additional notes on their occupation, property and overall standard of living may also be included.
Many famous names can be discovered in the records including world famous playwright William Shakespeare. Dated 25th March 1616, Shakespeare’s will details how he left a sum of one hundred and fifty pounds to both his daughters (over £380,000 today) as well as his wife the pleasure of his ‘second best bed’.
Pride and Prejudice author Jane Austen also appears in collection. Upon her death on 18th July 1817, she possessed assets totalling around £800 (£60,000 today). The majority of this was given to her sister Cassandra aside from £50 to her brother Henry and a further £50 to a Madame Bigoen – who had previously acted as a nurse to her family.
The records also reveal that the privateer and explorer Sir Francis Drake was somewhat of a real life Robin Hood. Having plundered many Spanish naval vessels and earned a fortune during his adventures in the Americas, Drake left forty pounds to the ‘poore people’ of the town and Parish of Plymouth in 1596 – the equivalent of £150,000 today.
The original records are held at The National Archives and some of the earliest records in the collection cover males as young as 14 and girls as young as 12. This changed in 1837, when it was decided by the court that both genders must be over the age of 21 to have a will proved.
On top of monetary matters, these records tell us more about the private lives of some very public figures and will help historians discover more about the dynamics of their personal and familial relationships.
The majority of records in the collection also pre-date civil registration, the government system established in 1837 to keep accurate accounts of citizens’ lives in documents such as censuses. As such, the collection is a valuable resource for anybody looking to trace an ancestor living before the mid-19th century.
Ancestry.co.uk Content Manager Miriam Silverman comments: “These probate records provide fascinating insight into the final fortunes of some of our nations most famous names, right down to who should get their bed.â€
“They are an incredibly valuable family history resource, covering a period in history from which few official documents remain.â€
Disclosure: Some links are compensated affiliate links.
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I have spent a good few hours this week lost in Parish Records transcripts looking for a couple of different families on behalf of friends who wanted some help breaking through their respective brick walls.
One of good things, about the times in which we live, is that more and more Parish Records are becoming available to us online.
Only this week TheGenealogist has announced that they have uploaded another large number of transcripts to their site and this plus what can be found at Ancestry, Findmypast or FamilySearch means that as the evenings draw in I can lose myself in these essential data sets as I try to get branches of my own family back another generation.
Any way, here is that announcement from TheGenealogist:
TheGenealogist has continued to add to its extensive collection of parish records with the release of almost 385,000 new individual record transcripts covering a wide variety of counties in England. The records cover the period from the mid 1500s to 2005.
This major addition of baptisms, marriages and burials include many famous and also notorious ancestors. In our Essex records, we uncovered the family history of shadowy highwayman, Dick Turpin, born in Hempstead, Essex, baptised in 1705, as Richardus Turpin, in the same parish where his parents had married. He started life as a butcher, but came into contact with the ‘Essex Gang’ and embarked on more clandestine, criminal activities.
The new Parish records give details of his early family life with his brother and two sisters in the early 1700s. Tracking him down proves easier now than the authorities experienced at the time! He subsequently changed his name to John Palmer, but after a lengthy time evading capture, his real life and identity as a poacher, burglar, horse thief and killer was exposed following a letter Turpin wrote to his brother in law and he was executed in 1739, but his legend continues to this day.
The new parish records added cover the counties of Bedfordshire, Devon, Essex, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Middlesex, Rutland, Shropshire and Westmoreland, it’s an addition of a substantial amount of individuals around the country. The newly added records cover a range of baptisms, marriages and burials in these counties.
Mark Bayley, Head of Development at TheGenealogist comments:
â€We are committed to constantly adding new records to the website. The new parish records are a continued response to our customers requests for more parish records and pre-1837 information. We’ve got much more in the pipeline coming through in the next few months. You may find your own Dick Turpin in the records!â€
The latest parish record releases are part of a concerted ongoing project on TheGenealogist with many more Parish Records due in early 2014.
Disclosure: All links are compensated affiliate links.
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I have just been to Southwell Workhouse in Nottinghamshire to look over an actual workhouse that is now run by the National Trust as a museum.
By doing this and seeing the layout of the accommodation, with its day rooms and exercise yards, my understanding of how these institutions worked has become clear.
In past times, before Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, the care of the poor members of the community fell to the monks in the various religious houses throughout England and Wales. With the reorganisation that the dissolution brought, those poor ancestors of ours who had the misfortune to fall on hard times, would then have become the responsibility of their parish.
Under this parish system, the old poor law had coped well enough until around the year 1800 when, under increasing demands being made on the system the authorities were forced to review the process for supporting the poor.
The situation was that unemployment had risen to new heights, as a result of the burgeoning industrialisation of the country. Britain now required less men to make the goods that had previously been manufactured by workers in the cottage industries.
On top of this the disaster of a succession of bad harvests that meant those who subsisted in rural areas found it difficult to feed themselves, added to the demand placed on the poor law system as it had been constituted.
As if this was not enough for the Government, the ending of the Napoleonic Wars had meant that a great number of soldiers now had come back from France and they had no work waiting for them at home.
The Deserving Poor.
In my family tree I was, at first, surprised that none of my ancestors seemed to have ended up in the workhouse. As I found more and more forebears I had become complacent that all my lot seemed to make it in the world without having to “Go On the Parish†and then I found one.
It was a sad shock for me as the lady in question had been the wife of a Master Mariner, the mother of several children who had all married and were making their way well in the world. But there she was in one of the census spending the end of her life in the workhouse!
Her husband was nowhere to be found in the census and so I speculated that he must have died abroad, not being able to find his death record. She, poor woman, had nowhere to go but into the workhouse.
But the workhouse was also a place where medical care could be given to those with little means in a time before the availability of free hospitals or medical insurance. So perhaps this explains why she was there? The deserving poor were segregated from the idle poor having different quarters and exercise yards.
The Idle Poor.
The number of workhouses had grown after the enactment of the Workhouse Test Act of 1723. The thinking behind this was that this new Act would help to prevent irresponsible claims being made on a parish’s poor rate. Something that concerned those who had to find the money to run the system as the funding of it was paid for by the wealthier members of the parish.
By the 1830s, in England and Wales, most parishes had at least one workhouse to send its poor to.
So what would any of our ancestors, unlucky enough to have found themselves in this position have faced? Those poor unfortunates who had no option but to seek “indoor relief†would have to endure unpalatable conditions inside the institution. It was designed to be thus so as to put people off from entering the workhouse unless they had run out of alternatives for survival outside.
Families were split up. Men and women segregated with children over seven separated from their mothers and forced to live in the children’s section.
On admission they would have to undress, surrender their own clothes until they were discharged, have a thorough wash and then dress in the workhouse uniform which was usually made of rough and shapeless material. This was all aimed at discouraging people from entering the system by stripping away part of their identity.
The belief, at the time, was that the undeserving poor were idle and so they were made to do tedious jobs. Inmates who were not aged or infirm would have to work for their keep. The jobs given to them were deliberately chosen to be monotonous and boring. At Southwell they would grind corn, pick oakum or, for the females, do laundry work.
The picture to the left is of an old rope from the docks that the inmates would pick apart so that the fibres could be sold back to the docks to be used in the caulking boats and ships.
So what about the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 and how this shook up the system?
There will be more detail about the workhouse inside my course on English and Welsh family history at: http://www.FamilyHistoryResearcher.com
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I see that Ancestry.co.uk has launched online Surrey Parish Records, 1538-1987, featuring more than two and a half million historic Surrey parish records in the most comprehensive collection of its type available online.
The records, the originals of which are held at Surrey County Council’s Surrey History Centre, detail baptisms, marriages and burials contained in Anglican parish registers, dating from 1538 to 1987.
Crucially many records in the collection pre-date civil registration, the government system established in 1837 to keep accurate accounts of citizens’ births, marriages and deaths, making this collection a valuable resource for anybody looking to trace an ancestor living before the 19th century.
Analysis of these records reveals fascinating historical trends, for example that the number of marriages increased by almost 1,000 in 1915 compared to the previous year, as couples rushed to the altar following the declaration of the First World War. (The number of marriages was 2,727 in 1914, increasing to 3,710 in 1915.)
Included in the records are a number of famous Surrey residents, such as:
Other names of note who feature in the records include Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy, who captained Darwin’s famous voyage around the world on HMS Beagle, Sir Barnes Nevill Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb used in the Dambusters Raid, and Jerome David Kern, one of America’s most successful composers of musical theatre, who met and married his wife Eva Leale in Walton on Thames.
In addition, the Surrey roots of Academy Award-winning actors Sir Laurence Olivier and Kate Winslet can be traced in the collection. The baptism of Olivier’s father Anglican Priest Gerard Kerr Olivier is recorded as taking place on 30th May 1869, 38 years before he welcomed young Laurence into the world in 1907, and the marriage of Winslet’s third great grandparents Thomas Winslet and Priscilla Tasker on 7th December 1824 features in the records.
Also included are a number of interesting entries, such as a baptism record revealing one John William Hoakes’ job as the ‘Inspector of a Royal Lavatory’, and records of the marriages of the humorously named George East and Ellen West in 1895, and of Luke Sex and Sarah Eager in 1743.
The collection can be searched by name, spouse’s name, father’s name, mother’s name, birth date, baptism date, marriage date, burial date, and by parish.
Miriam Silverman, UK Content Manager, from Ancestry.co.uk comments: “Spanning half a millennium, these records are an invaluable resource for anyone looking to research the history of Surrey and its people – including some of the county’s most famous literary and sporting residents.â€
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“These records have been added to our comprehensive collection of Parish records, featuring millions of records from the length and breadth of Englandâ€
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Julian Pooley, from Surrey Council’s Surrey History Centre adds:
“We are delighted that Ancestry.co.uk is helping us to make Surrey’s records so widely accessible for research. Thousands of people contact us each year seeking Surrey ancestors because they feel a need to understand their history, their family heritage, their place in their community. The discovery of these roots is more than simple genealogical number-crunching; it teaches new research skills, it brings scattered families together and makes new friends and it increases knowledge and awareness of the communities we live in.â€
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A free launch event for the digitised Surrey Parish Records 1538-1987 collection will be held on Saturday 6th July (10.30am – 3:30pm) at Surrey History Centre in Woking, with Ancestry.co.uk staff on hand to answer any questions about the records and help people search the collection, and experts from Surrey History Centre, East Surrey Family History Society and West Surrey Family History Society available to answer your family history questions. To book places on the presentations please phone 01483 518737 or email shs@surreycc.gov.uk
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I’ve been road testing a family history course aimed at beginners this week from Love to Learn. It focuses on informal learning for people beginning to research their family trees and is extremely accessible for active seniors and adult learners with a computer.
The courses are designed for those who enjoy discovering new interests and acquiring knowledge – people who, as the name implies, love to learn.
I liked the video introductions and the multiple choice review at the end of each module.
Love to Learn is the UK’s first dedicated website that offers a wide range of online courses for adults who want to keep learning, in an informal way, in their own time, at their own pace.
How can it help you?
Two of its most popular courses help to trace your ancestors and build up a visual record of their old photographs. These are:
Scanning and Editing your Old photos and
This beginners’ online course helps you start exploring a fascinating field that, as most of you have probably already found, soon becomes a passion. It enables you to research your family history using internet resources including census, military and parish records.
Most people can trace their family back several generations, and some of us can even go back hundreds of years. However far you go, if you are just starting out, or know someone in this category, then this may be the perfect way to start discovering family’s stories.
The course is run in partnership with the experts from Imperial War Museums and Ancestry.co.uk and is led by history author and former teacher, John Child, its video tutor, and draws on his John’s own experiences of researching his ancestors. Mel Donnelly of Imperial War Museums has researched family and military history for 20 years. She helps you find out about people who fought in the British Army.
As you learn you’ll create your personal album for your family’s enjoyment and fascination. The course costs £38.00 and provides eight to ten hours on online learning. For more information, please go to http://www.lovetolearn.co.uk/family-history
 Disclosure: I was supplied with a complimentary copy of this course to review by the publishers, but with no conditions attached.
If you would like more tips on researching your English or Welsh Family History then why not sign up for my tips and a special FREE report using the box below…
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At the Who Do You Think You Are? LIVE show, on the Pen & Sword stand, I was able to catch up with genealogist and author Anthony Adolph as he signed copies of his new book: Tracing Your Aristocratic Ancestors.
He graciously allowed me an interview afterwards and, as always, you can just tell the passion that he holds for his subject.
Watch my short video below and hear his argument that we all have aristocratic ancestors!
That being the case then, this book should appeal to every family historian.
To buy your copy now go to:
Tracing Your Aristocratic Ancestors: A Guide for Family Historians
Disclosure: This is a compensated affiliate link which may reward me should you purchase.
Send to KindleI was due to meet Anthony Adolph at the Who Do You Think you Are? LIVE show where he was signing copies of his book: Tracing Your Aristocratic Ancestors: A Guide for Family Historians
As he began signing the books on the Pen & Sword stand he was joined by the Princess Maria Sviatopolk-Mirski, a Russian Princess who had grown up in straiten circumstances and now lives in London.
She has now traced her family history back and finds that her family had once had possession of Mir Castle in Belarus. Her success in finding her aristocratic ancestry is one that many family historians would like to replicate!
Send to KindleLike many, I have been fascinated by the reports in the media lately regarding the finding of Richard III’s remains in the former Greyfriars Church in Leicester.
I was a student in Leicester in the early 1980’s. So it was that I walked past the rather nondescript area where King Richard III was buried on a daily basis on my way to and from lectures and never for one instance thinking of the historical importance of the church that had stood there before.
On my most recent visit to the city, back in January, I was aware of the excitement that was building around the find at Greyfriars car park and picked up some leaflets at the tourist office on the subject. Then this week the world’s media covered the announcement that it was “beyond reasonable doubt” the skeleton of the monarch.
From my point of view, as a family historian, one of the really interesting things was the use of DNA from a descendent of the dead king’s sister to reach this conclusion.
The team from Leicester University had turned to the historian and author John Ashdown-Hill. Back in 2004 he had been able to tracked down the late Joy Ibsen, a direct descendant of Richard’s sister Anne of York and from her to the Canadian born Michael Ibsen, a cabinet maker in London.
Again, of interest to us family historians, is what John Ashdown-Hill said on the BBC’s Radio 4 “Today” programme
“An enormous family tree grew on my computer. You have to trace every possible line of descent because you don’t know which one will die out in 1745 and which one will carry on to the present day – you have to trace them all.â€
On the Who Do You Think You Are Magazine’s website it is reported that the team did not rely on just the one line from Anne of York down to Joy Ibsen, as is the impression gained from some of the media reports this week.
Not only did the genealogists find documentary evidence for each ‘link’ of the chain between Anne of York and the late Joy Ibsen, but they were able to make contact with a second maternal line descendant – who wishes remain anonymous – whose DNA was used to confirm a match between genetic material extracted from the skeleton and a swab provided by Joy’s son, Michael.
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“Right from the start of the project, we did not want to rely entirely on the DNA between Michael and the skeleton. We always wanted to triangulate that wherever possible,†explains Professor Schürer. “We set about trying to secure a second maternal line, and after several weeks of research we actually did discover this person. The documentary evidence again is there to support this.â€
Source: http://www.whodoyouthinkyouaremagazine.com/news/genealogists-help-confirm-identity-leicesters-royal-remains
In a couple of weeks the Who Do You Think You Are? LIVE show will be at Olympia and already they have moved the talk by Dr Turi King called “Discovering Richard III” from a smaller area to now be held in the Celebrity Theatre / SOG studio 1 on Saturday, 1.00pm – 1.45pm.
It is billed as telling the story of the research project undertaken at the University of Leicester to discover the burial place of Richard III and the related work to scientifically identify the skeletal remains.
Personally I can’t wait for this year’s WDYTYA? LIVE as I missed last year due to fog disrupting my travel plans!
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Send to KindleI’ve had an email from genealogist and author Anthony Adolph this week. For long term readers of this blog you may remember that he provided me with a fantastic interview at the Who Do Yo Think You Are? LIVE back in 2011 which you can revisit here if you so wish.
Well Anthony wanted to draw my readers attention to a project that he is involved with to find people who may be related to President Lincoln.
It is to help celebrate the British launch of Steven Spielberg’s movie ‘Lincoln’ and the 204th anniversary of the president’s birth on 12 February, that he is working with the Illinois Office of Tourism to find British relatives of America’s most famous president.
In 1637, Samuel Lincoln, an apprentice weaver in Norwich, left his home in the obscure Norfolk village of Hingham to brave a voyage across the Atlantic. Samuel had no idea he would survive to raise a family in the new colonies of America, let alone that his great great great grandson Abraham would become one of the greatest figures in American history.
This means that if you have ancestors from Hingham or have Lincoln ancestors from the Norwich area, you could have President Lincoln in your family tree!
Illinois, the home state of Abraham Lincoln, hosts many Lincoln attractions and is a great place to visit for a truly adventurous holiday, where you can visit the house Lincoln shared with Mary Todd, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum and the Springfield cemetery where he is buried.
If you know of a family connection with the Lincolns of Hingham, Norfolk, please contact Anthony Adolph via www.anthonyadolph.co.uk. You could be in for a trip to Illinois!
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