Tag: British ancestors

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The Society of Genealogists’ Live Online Events for November to help trace your family history.

 

News:

This list, written by the Society of Genealogists, has some great Zoom talks for those with British Ancestors. I think I’ll sign up to some of them myself. Here is what they plan:

The Society of Genealogists (SoG) is pleased to offer the following Live Online Events taking place in November to help you trace your family history.  

 

Society of Genealogists website

Join the Society of Genealogists on one of their Live Zoom Events, the application is free and easy to use. If you have not attended one of the SoG’s online talks before, more information can be found on their website

 

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Saturday, 7 November 10:30 – Your Buckinghamshire Ancestors

Buckinghamshire has a varied and interesting history. It retains beautiful countryside, especially the Chiltern Hills which are an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. After the Industrial Revolution, Wolverton became known for building railway carriages, while furniture and paper industries grew in the south. The county was famous for its lace industry, giving work to women and children.

Antony Marr looks at the historic County of Buckinghamshire – its history, geography and ancestry. Antony then offers advice and lots of advice to help you research your Buckinghamshire ancestors using the amazing resources available in the County and elsewhere.

A one-hour talk with Antony Marr, cost £10.00/£5.00 SoG members

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Saturday, 7 November 16:00-17:45 – My Ancestor was in the Census – Well they should have been!

An up-to-date look at what census material is available online as well as covering the reasons that you may not find that ancestor may not be there. In this tutorial, we will have an extended Q&A session, so bring your questions along.

A tutorial with John Hanson, cost £16.00/£8.00 SoG members

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Wednesday, 11 November 14:00 – SoG Orientation:

Name Rich Sources that Supplement Parish Registers before 1837 in England and Wales

A one-hour talk with Else Churchill, cost £10.00/£5.00 SoG members

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Saturday, 14 November 10:30 – Death and Taxes: Understanding the Death Duty Registers

One of family history’s best kept secrets – records of death duty payments.

Many of us have found our ancestors’ wills and know that they can often give us really valuable information about our family. But very few of us have thought about looking at related records for death duties. For more than 100 years, from 1796 to 1903, the Inland Revenue maintained a series of registers recording these payments. The National Archives now hold the registers, waiting for us to search them.

In this talk, Dave Annal tells us all about them. He covers what’s in the surviving records. Then he describes how to use them to uncover fascinating facts about the lives and times of our 19th century ancestors.

A one-hour talk with Dave Annal, cost £10.00/£5.00 SoG members

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Saturday, 14 November 16:00 – Nonconformity in Wales

Are records relating to your Welsh ancestors missing from Parish Registers? The answer could lie in them being chapel members. The 1851 Religious Census in Wales revealed that almost 80% of the population worshipped as part of non-conformist congregations.

We will examine online and offline resources available in researching Welsh non-conformity, be it Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Unitarian, Congregationalist or Society of Friends. Non-conformist worship in Wales has been a feature of Welsh culture for hundreds of years – open-air revival meetings; song and culture celebrated at Gymanfa Ganu and the Eisteddfod – the chapel has been the core of many communities in a uniquely Welsh way.

Understanding how our Welsh ancestors worshipped is an essential key to our family histories.

A one-hour talk with Gill Thomas, cost £10.00/£5.00 SoG members

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Wednesday, 18 November 14:00 – Getting the Most from the Society Library Catalogue (SOGCAT)

Join Else Churchill for an interesting talk on SoGCAT, the Society of Genealogists’ online library catalogue. The SoG Library holds about 135,000 items. Where do you start to find information on your ancestors? SoGCAT lists what we hold. So learning how to use it gives you a huge getting started benefit. In this talk, Else will provide you with lots of information on how to use SOGCAT and what it holds to further your research.

A one-hour talk with Else Churchill, the Genealogist at the Society. Places are free and go very quickly, so please book your place in advance.

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Saturday, 21 November 10:30 – The Parish Chest

Discover the importance of the parish – the unit of local government into the 19th century in the lives of our ancestors. Find out how the parish worked, what records were generated and where to find them. Learn how to use such records in family history, local history and house history research.

A one-hour talk with Gill Blanchard, cost £10.00/£5.00 SoG members

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Saturday, 21 November 14:00- Online Resources for Property and Taxation

A look at the wide variety of records available online for ownership or occupation of land or a house.

Beyond civil registration, parish and census records there are few genealogical sources that cover a significant percentage of the population. But property and property-based taxation and electoral records name all those who own, or even just rent, property over a certain value. These sources can not only provide information on wealth and social status but even point to specific buildings or pieces of land owned or occupied by an ancestor.

This talk will look at the range of property-related records available online, to help you discover more about your ancestors from the Middle Ages to 1918, and to unearth the information they can provide for your family history.

A one-hour talk with Peter Christian, cost £10.00/£5.00 SoG members

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Wednesday, 25 November 14:00 – Tracing Brewery & Publican Ancestors

Until fairly recently the public house in its various guises was a centre of the community and innkeepers were often respected figures locally. In addition most towns and villages had a brewery or two providing beer to slake the throats of everybody from princes to paupers.

In this talk Simon Fowler discusses the major sources you need to use if you have a publican or brewer on your family tree. Simon also looks at the changing nature of the tavern from the simple beer house to gaudy gin palace.

Bring your own Beer!

A one-hour talk with Simon Fowler, cost £10.00/£5.00 SoG members

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Thursday, 26 November 14:00- Making your Genealogy more Credible & Useful to Others

Genealogy needs to be shared. It serves no point otherwise.

For those who want to use your work, you offer a huge benefit if you can give some assurance that it is of sound quality. The facts you include need to be seen as coming from reliable sources that can be checked. So assurance depends on you stating where your facts have come from and providing a reference to where you found them.

In this one-hour talk, Ian Waller explains that referencing is critical. Cost £10.00/£5.00 SoG members

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Saturday, 28 November 10:30 – My Ancestor Came from Birmingham

Has your family history taken you to Birmingham? Maybe your ancestors were ‘Brummies born and bred’ or maybe they only spent some of their lives in Birmingham.

Join Doreen Hopwood as she explores and explains the numerous family history sources available so that you can discover how your ancestors lived, worked and played in ‘The City of a Thousand Trades’.

A one-hour talk with Doreen Hopwood. Cost £10.00/£5.00 SoG members

 

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Saturday, 28 November 14:00 – Madness, Mania and Melancholia: the Mental Health of our Ancestors

The history of mental ill-health is poorly understood and many of those who were labelled as ‘idiots’, ‘imbeciles’ or ‘lunatics’ in the past would have a very different diagnosis today.

This presentation looks at the history of reactions to and the treatment of those who we would now recognise as being mentally ill, or as having a learning disability. It also investigates the institutions where sufferers might be held and the sources we can use to find out more about these, often forgotten, members of our family.

A one-hour talk with Dr Janet Few, cost £10.00/£5.00 SoG members

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All events must be pre-booked through the Society of Genealogists website and SoG members should remember to login first, to receive the member’s discounted price.

Join the SoG at one of their Live Zoom Events, the application is free and easy to use. If you have not attended one of their online talks before, more information can be found on their website

 

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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!

 

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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

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