If you like family or social history then this online publication will be right up your street! I’ve contributed the article about Hertha Ayrton, a pioneering British engineer, scientist and suffragette.
In the March 2023 issue of the Discover Your Ancestors Periodical you can read the following great articles:
Meet the court leet: Archivist Rachel Bates reveals how court leet records can provide a fascinating window into early modern society, as well as aid family history research
Discovering Rugby, Tennessee: Helen Baggott tells the story of a utopian community which didn’t quite work as planned, but has left an interesting legacy for today
Shocking times: Nick Thorne traces historical records for Hertha Ayrton, a pioneering British engineer and scientist overlooked because of her gender
The madness of Ilda Orme: How do you finish writing a biography when you don’t know how the subject’s life ended? Follow Nell Darby on a fascinating and frustrating quest
The father of self-help: Lorraine Schofield tells the story of Samuel Smiles
History in the details: Materials – rubber
Sign up today for only £24.99 and receive the following:
12 monthly issues of the Periodical
Access to 500,000,000 birth, marriage and death records
Free data: Titanic passenger list
Free ebook: Kelly’s 1931 Directory of Bromley; including Bickley, Chislehurst, Orpington and District
Next week, so hurry if you want to attend this great online event for family historians!
I’ll be doing a new talk for the show about using a smartphone to access the history around us as we take a day out in the country.
The Family History Show Online takes place on 25th September, featuring two online lecture theatres, the popular ‘Ask the Experts’ area where you can put questions forward to specialists, live chat and forum where you can talk with other attendees, as well as a whole host of stalls so you can ask for advice as well as buy genealogical products.
New Feature for The Family History Show Online: The main Lecture Theatre now includes Live Chat, so you can post questions and comments as you watch the talk. The speakers will be on hand to answer these during the broadcast time!
Don’t miss out on a day packed with talks by experts including Nick Barratt, get answers to your questions in 1-2-1 expert sessions, and hear advice from a host of Family History Societies and genealogical suppliers. You can also meet the Discover Your Ancestors team.
Press Release from The Family History Show, Online
The Family History Show, Online, run by Discover Your Ancestors, returns on Saturday 26th September 2020 in place of the London Family History Show for this year. Building on the huge success of the first online Family History Show in June, where over a thousand attendees enjoyed a great day, the next one is on track to be even better!
Online access means that we are all able to safely enjoy many of the usual features of the physical show from wherever we are in the world, as well as making it possible for those that have disabilities to easily attend.
The Family History Show, Online will, mirroring the format of the very successful live shows, feature an online lecture theatre, the popular ‘Ask the expert’ area – where you can put questions forward to their specialists – as well as over 100 stalls where you can ask for advice as well as buy genealogical products.
Q&A Expert Session
Attendees are invited to submit questions via the website and a selection will be put forward to the panel in a multi-user Zoom session that is streamed on a linked video channel for the show.
Visit stalls and chat
To make this online experience as useful to family historians as attending the physical show would have been, you can “visit” a stall in the virtual exhibition hall. With over 100 present there will be a wide variety of societies and companies.
Built into the website is the ability to talk to some of the stallholders by text, audio or video from the comfort of your own home. With this facility, you can ask them for advice regarding their family history society or discuss their organisation and also purchase from their online stall various downloadable and physical products to help you with your research.
Lectures
In the virtual lecture theatre there will be the chance to watch new talks from the same expert lecturers who would have been at the physical event and are on the ‘Ask the Expert’ panel. These presentations will cover a wide variety of family history topics from DNA to how to find family information in military records. All of these videos are subtitled.
Feedback from the last Family History Show, Online:
“The Exhibitor Hall, with the video chat and Question Feed, and details and links to their products, etc. Your show is a very close, and in some ways better, reproduction of the live event, and I’m looking forward to attending next year’s event.” Scott Barker
“I know the actual shows are great, but for us not able to get there, these online days are ideal. I put aside time to listen and it felt like a ‘day away’ from the usual routine. Well done and thank you.” Ruth Owen
“I understand there must have been a lot of planning for the event under such tricky circumstances and it was absolutely superb in the end. Thank you very much for a really good day, your experts were helpful and I thoroughly enjoyed hearing their advice and information.” Sue Farley
Thank you so much for a great show. Learnt a lot and the experts were very interesting to listen to. Special thanks to Amelia Bennett. Looking forward to September. Keep safe” Irene Baldock
Tickets to attend the next online Family History Show on 26th September 2020 are available now for just £6.00 each (£8.00 on the day). All ticket holders will also receive a digital Goody Bag worth over £10 on the day.
This Sunday, 24th September 2017 sees the first Family History Show – London and I am off to see what it is like!
Organised by Discover Your Ancestors Magazine (to whom I am a regular contributor of articles to) it should be great as they are the same people behind the ever successful event up in York. Based on the format of TheFamily History Show, York it is being held at Sandown Park Racecourse between 10 am and 4:30 and is very affordable to get in to. There is plenty of free parking on site with allocated disabled spaces as well.
Unfortunately for those coming by train, due to engineering work, Esher Train Station will be closed on the day of the show. Surbiton Train Station, however, is just a 15 minute taxi ride from Sandown Racecourse. Alternatively, the K3 bus from Surbiton Train Station will take you to Esher High Street, the race course is just a few minutes’ walk up the High Street.
I went to the York event back in June. Watch this video of this year’s York event to get a taster of what is to come down South!
Free Talks throughout the day
10:00 Show Openingwith Caliban’s Dream, Medieval Musicians
11:00 Breaking Down Brick Walls In Your Family History ResearchMark Bayley, Online Expert Resolve stumbling blocks in your family history research using innovative search strategies and unique record sets to find those missing relatives.
12:00 Tracing Your Military AncestorsChris Baker, Military Expert & Professional Researcher Chris draws on his experience from researching thousands of soldiers to explore what can be found when looking for a military ancestor.
13:00 Breaking Down Brick Walls In Your Family History ResearchMark Bayley, Online Expert
14:00 Tips & Tricks for Online ResearchKeith Gregson, Professional Researcher & Social Historian Keith shares top tips & techniques for finding elusive ancestors, illustrated by some fascinating case studies.
15:00 Breaking Down Brick Walls In Your Family History ResearchMark Bayley, Online Expert
Disclosure: Please note this post contains affiliate links.
Who Do You Think You Are? LIVE – formally at Olympia in London
Who Do You Think You Are? Live – latterly at the NEC in Birmingham
I am going to miss the annual genealogy-fest that was the Who Do You Think You Are? Live show but it doesn’t come as a surprise. This year’s show was enjoyable but, as I and many other commentators across the web had noticed, the number of on-topic stands were down while the number of charity booths and other stands were now very noticeable in the hall.
😥
Where do we go to now? Well…we could always check out the smaller family history fairs up and down the country and I am already looking forward to attending the Yorkshire Family History Fair at the York racecourse on June the 24th. See: www.yorkshirefamilyhistoryfair.com
This one is new, but like the York event which has been a regular in the calendar for some years, it is being run by my old friendsDiscover Your Ancestors Magazine, for whom I am a regular contributor of articles. Both shows are sponsored by TheGenealogist
Hope to see you there. Oh, and by the way, I’ve just seen that they have a special offer on the tickets at the moment: Early Bird offer: Buy your tickets early and when you buy one ticket, they will give you another ticket FREE!
Yorkshire Family History Fair
Saturday 24th June 2017
10am to 4.30pm
The Knavesmire Exhibition Centre, The Racecourse, York, YO23 1EX
Disclosure: As an article writer I have a commercial relationship with Discover Your Ancestors and TheGenealogist. Also, affiliate links to Discover Your Ancestors and TheGenealogist are used above.
Disclosure: Please note this post contains affiliate links.
Plan of Birmingham By William Westley (Source) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
I love looking at maps, when it comes to thinking about my ancestors and working out where they lived.
I know that I am not alone in this, but that other people just don’t seem to get it.
What is it that we, who find maps interesting, see in them?
For me it is seeing the layout of places compared to how they have developed today, for one.
I also love the ability to sometimes be able to work out why an ancestor lived where they did – perhaps it is the nearness of an industry, or some other place of work, that becomes blindingly obvious when you find that their street was a five minute walk from the factory or the dockyard where your rope-maker ancestor was employed.
I find it exciting to see how, in 1731, people who lived in Birmingham would have had a five minute walk from the centre of their town to see countryside. That there were fields on the other side of the road to St Philips’ Church (now the Cathedral) and there was no Victoria Square, Town hall or the Council House at the top of New Street and that Colmore Row was then called New Hill Lane!
Birmingham 1731
Maps can be very useful for the researcher, looking into their family tree and so I have put together my personal list of the top five resources that I would recommend.
In reverse order…
Number 5: The Phillimore Atlas & Index of Parish Registers. The maps in this book can help you identify contiguous parishes to your ancestors’ parish. Useful when you have a brick wall finding christenings, marriages and burials of your kin in their original parish, consider looking at the surrounding area and researching in the neighbouring parish records to see if you can find them.
Number 4: The Interactive Bomb Map of London online at bombsight.org.
The Bomb Sight Project has scanned original 1940s bomb census maps, geo-referenced the maps and digitally captured the geographical locations of all the falling bombs recorded and made it available online. You can use their interactive map to explore and search for different bomb locations all over London. I have used it to find where an ancestor’s shop was on the street. As a post war building now stands on the site I wondered if it had been destroyed in the blitz. Using this application I was able to discover that it had indeed been destroyed by a German bomb.
You can click on individual bombs on the map and find out information relating to the neighbouring area by reviewing contextual images and also read memories from the Blitz.
Number 3: FamilySearch’s maps at http://maps.familysearch.org
When I am trying to find out which other Church of England parishes exist in an area, as an online alternative to the Phillimores (mentioned above), I often use the maps.familysearch.org resource. It can be useful if you want to discover which county a parish is in, which diocese it is part of, or which civil registration region it was in. You can also use the drop down menu to find its rural deanery, poor law union, hundred, C of E province (Canterbury or York) or division.
This website gives you access to over 160,000 maps from all the countries of the United Kingdom and not just Scotland! With maps dating from between 1560 and 1964 this is one of my ‘go to’ websites when I want to see a map of a place that my ancestors lived. I often turn to a map over laid on a modern map or satellite view or chose to view an old map side by side with a modern version.
Number 1: National Tithe Maps online via TheGenealogist.co.uk
My top map resource is that of the collection of surviving tithe maps that have been digitised by TheGenealogist for the ability to often find ancestors actual plots of land and houses from the time of the tithe survey (1837 to the mid 1850s and sometimes later when an altered apportionment map was drawn up). While the accompanying Tithe Apportionment books detail the land that they either owned or occupied, these records can be so revealing as to where our forbears lived and whether they had some land to grow produce or keep animals. All levels of society are included and surprisingly some streets in major cities were included. The collection covers approximately 75% of England & Wales – as a minority of land was not subject to tithes by this time.
Disclosure – I do have a business relationship with TheGenealogist as I write articles on using their records and resources that can be found in family history magazines such asDiscover Your Ancestors, Your Family History and Family Tree for which I receive remuneration. Not withstanding this fact I stand by my selection of the tithe maps as my personal number one map resource for the ability to use them to discover the plot where an ancestor lived and what they may have grown there.
In addition some, but not all, of the links in this post are compensated affiliate links.
Drawing up your English/Welsh family tree may be a simple matter for you.
Some readers of this blog, however, may be new to family history research. If you are in this situation and you don’t know where it is that you should look for your ancestors, then I have a tutorial guide that can help.
The problem could be that you just don’t know in which of the many genealogical records to head for when you are looking for your past family. Perhaps you have even made a start and tried the easy and obvious records and now wonder where else to look?
If your forebears came from England or Wales then, with a bit of knowledge of the various different record sets and resources that are out there, you should be able to easily put your family tree together and add your ancestors to its branches.
Just like all of us, at sometime, you may come up against an annoying brick wall in your research.
When you can’t find an elusive English or Welsh ancestor, don’t despair as quite often it will be possible to get around this logjam by simply making use of a different research tactic to tease out that oh so difficult to find ancestor – the one that you had thought had disappeared for good. Other times you may just need to use one of the many further record sets to break down your brick wall and so get your family tree research back on track.
The best way to discover your ancestors is usually to learn a bit more about all the many records, data research sites and various archives that are available to you. Think about taking a genealogy course. I have an extremely well received family history course that can quickly give you the tools to put you back on track – more about that in the guide.
or you can copy and paste the URL below on this page to Download my guide:
Genealogy Fast Track Secrets.
Register your details and you can start right away!
I discover that she was descended from a war hero who had been awarded the Croix de Guerre by the King of Belgium and a look at her family shows us that it was made up of a number of determined characters!
I also discover that Victoria had a lonely childhood without friends. If you read my piece I am sure your heart strings will be tugged at to find that, as a child, only one person turned up to her birthday party – all the other kids having better things to do on the day, like playing on their bikes!
I look at an error in the General Register Office records that misspells her mother’s maiden name on Victoria’s birth record. It is a good example of how even official primary records can contain mistakes and a lesson to us all to think creatively when we can’t find someone in the data.
I explain where to find the records, that I made use of to trace the family, so that you could apply the techniques in your own family history research.
We also discover some fascinating facts about her father. He turns out to have a number of more interesting strings to his bow than you might have expected from an average insurance claims inspector.
Also in this month’s Discover Your Ancestors Periodical Dr Simon Wills examines the wreck of the SS London 150 years on, Jocelyn Robson investigates a woman who faked her own death, and there is much much more to read.
You can also read some sample articles before you buy (including this one on Victoria Wood) by clicking on the articles tab while you are there! So take a look now at Discover Your Ancestors.
I’ve been reading a fascinating article by leading genealogist Laura Berry in this month’s Discover Your Ancestors Periodical. It explains more about how between the 17th and 20th centuries hundreds of thousands of foreign settlers applied for protection from the Crown and government by becoming British subjects.
Laura, knows her subject as she is a freelance writer, family historian and archive researcher who has been the lead genealogist for the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? series in the past and has written about family history for many publications. In her article for Discover Your Ancestors she explains that prior to 1844 the vast majority of applicants became ‘denizens’ after pleading for a patent of denization from the monarch, which bestowed certain privileges and was easier to obtain than a private Act of Naturalisation from Parliament. To be entitled to almost equal rights as people born in this country, aliens needed to be ‘naturalised’, a process that was made more affordable with the passing of the 1844 Naturalisation Act when the Home Office assumed responsibility for issuing naturalisation certificates and a private Act of Parliament was no longer necessary.
This is only one of many really interesting articles in this month’s online periodical and I highly recommend you buy a copy.
Would you like a Family History magazine for free?
Are you looking for a fresh approach to researching your family history? Or are you keen to promote your family history services?
Whether you are long-standing or just starting out, whether you are advanced in your research, have reached early brick walls or work in this industry, Discover Your Ancestors magazine may help you along.
Discover Your Ancestors is packed full of family histories, case studies, UK and overseas features and advice on identifying those hard to find forebears.
Discover Your Ancestors magazine is now on its third annual edition in print, and is available at WHSmith stores around the UK or selected overseas premium newsagents or direct from the publisher here.
The magazine has also been running a monthly digital edition, to rave reviews. Priced at just £12 per annum, many loyal and engaged subscribers enjoy this digital magazine which is archived by issue in their very own members section of the magazine’s website.
But you don’t have to just take their word for it, or even take notice of those testimonials that are found on their website, you can try if for FREE!
I met these guys when they were on the next stand to me at Who Do You Think You Are? Live and I did this little video there.
So its a great pleasure that they are willing to offer my readers a free trial. As they say in this email that I recently received recently:
We are inviting each and every one of your contacts to enjoy a FREE OF CHARGE 3 ISSUE TRIAL so they can find out for themselves what a good read it is.
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![By William Westley (Source) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](https://www.noseygenealogist.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Birmingham_-_Westley_Map_1731-300x234.png)
![detail from By William Westley (Source) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](https://www.noseygenealogist.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Birmingham-1731-1024x464.png)
The Phillimore Atlas & Index of Parish Registers
www.bombsight.org
http://maps.nls.uk/
TheGenealogist.co.uk
