Now here is a very special interview for you from my trip to the Who Do You Think You Are? LIVE show at the end of February.
I was on my way to The Society of Genealogists stand, where I was volunteering on the second hand book stall as a way of giving something back to the SoG, when I spotted the well respected genealogist and author Anthony Adolph. He was taking questions from show-goers on the stand of the “Your Family Tree Magazine”, a publication for which he writes articles on surname research.
As a shareholder in an independent bookshop I am also aware of Anthony Adolph as an author of several books, including Full of Soup and Gold: The life of Henry Jermyn and many titles on family history.
He was gracious enough to give me a wonderful interview that began by reassuring me and my blog readers/ YouTube Channel viewers, that “we have all reached points in our family trees where we are stuck.” He revealed that he has been tracing his own family tree for getting on for thirty years now. “First of all as a complete and utter amateur, as a schoolboy, ” Mr Adolph said, “and then later on I became a professional.”
Giving some hope, to all those of us who find we are facing a brick wall, he charmingly admits that, just like everyone else, at the beginning of each of his family lines he is completely stuck.
The interview then goes on to touch on the four techniques for getting further back:
Oral History
Paper based
Surnames
DNA.
Anthony Adolph then reveals that he has become quite passionate about the latter and how DNA in genealogy enabled him to discover that the “cap” to his family tree was unusual. It seems that the Haplogroup, from which he descends from the genetic Adam and Eve, is G and so from Armenia, Georgia and Turkey. This is in contrast to the fact that most men in Europe are from group R.
You’ve traced an ancestor to Jersey, and you are wondering what you can find out about them. To your frustration, you rapidly discover that birth marriage and death records for Jersey are not available online. So what can you do?
Well, there are at least some useful Internet resources out there to help you get started. The most obvious one is the Census: Channel Island censuses from 1841 to 1901 are available both through Ancestry and Findmypast, and the 1911 census is on FindMyPast and will soon be fully available on Ancestry too.
A word of caution, though: the transcription is not entirely reliable on either site, and on top of that, some database search engines have problems with “divided†surnames like Le Sueur or Du Feu (not to mention Le Vavasseur dit Durell). So here’s a shameless plug: if you are going to do a lot of searching of censuses, you could do worse than purchase the paper census indexes produced by the CIFHS. They are a lot more accurate (well over 99%), and can (with a bit of fiddling) be cross-referenced back to the census images on the Internet.
There are also military records. If you’re looking at Channel Island relatives who served in the First World War, it’s well worth investigating at greatwarci.net – this is the website of the Channel Island Great War Study Group, and they maintain a very comprehensive list of people who served. The list is rather more complete than Ancestry’s transcript of what’s in the National Archives simply because Jersey residents served not only with the British armed forces but also with the Canadians and Australians. There were also at least a couple of thousand French nationals who joined up with the French military, but records for them are very scanty. If you are looking at other periods (and bear in mind Jersey had a garrison to protect it from the French right up until the 1930s), you may find references to service in Jersey on the military records of Chelsea Pensioners kept on FindMyPast, or on the GRO Regimental Indexes of birth marriage and death.
There are other useful resources too on Ancestry. There are three Channel Island postal directories – covering 1839, 1903 and 1927 – that may help to link a name to an address.
You may also be fortunate enough to find online family trees. Ancestry host them, as do Genesreunited, and there are also numerous independently-produced web sites. The general rule of thumb is to treat these as a guideline: they may be inaccurate, or they may tell the truth as far the researcher knows it – but not the whole story.
There’s a family tree in every home filing cabinet. In the past it may have tended to be written in scribbled handwriting in pencil or fading ballpoint. Now it is most likely to be on a professional looking template produce by a service such as Ancestry.com coupon Genealogy.
Every normal person has an interest in where he comes from. This may account for the natural affinity between grandparents and grandchildren. Children who have been given up for adoption at birth usually have a burning desire to discover their biological parents at some point in their lives. The instinct to search for family information seems to be linked to the human quest for knowledge using genealogy software coupons.
There is a fine line between ancestry and genealogy. Ancestry is concerned typically with distinguished or distinguished people. This might be the case particularly in Europe, but on other continents the term might be used with more spiritual connotations. Genealogy has a biological connotation and refers to the direct descendants of an individual or group. In general ancestry tends to move form the present backwards and genealogy moves from the past to the present.
Computer technology has made the compilation and use of data bases a great new way to manage data. Card catalogues that once occupied a number of rooms are now housed in a chip and accessed in a flash. This has revolutionized genealogy and the compilation of family trees.
Skeletons in the cupboard are quite interesting now. In previous years, before information was so widely accessible, people followed family ties with some trepidation, hoping not to find a black sheep. Now Australians are reportedly delighted to find a convict in their ancestry because it proves how long they have been on the continent. On the other hand some members of the European aristocracy have reason to be thoroughly ashamed of their feeble and evil relatives exposed now in the information age.
Anthropologists may dig up ancient bones and speculate on the origins of the human species. The more recent and well documented evidence of recent relatives shown by ancestry.com genealogy research can be equally interesting and more pertinent.
Aristocrat and commoner alike may wonder where their ancestor was when Jesus hung on the Cross or when the Great Plague decimated the European population. Similar speculations may have been behind the concocted story of African American Alex Hailey about his roots in Africa. Deep within the fiber of our beings there appears to be yearning to discover how we came about.
The great interest of parents in the family histories of prospective spouses is well documented in history, politics and literature and can be found using online genealogy software. As in the case of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ it can prove to have tragic consequences. It can also be very interesting for couples who may have met by chance in Australia to find that their near relatives lived in the same English village and must have known each other in earlier generations under different circumstances. Ancestry.com review genealogy may throw some light on this by producing a comprehensive family history.
There is a large amount of information for family history researchers, tracing their English or Welsh family tree, for the years as far back as 1837 on the web and then nothing! I know that many people, that are researching their Family tree for ancestors from the British Isles, find that they have this problem. As I wrote about, in a previous article on tracing and English family tree before 1837, it seems to become harder for us. 1837 is when civil registration started in England & Wales and the state took over from the established church the registering the citizen’s vital records.
You possibly have been amazed at the ease you had finding those later records of your forebears by using the usual subscription websites. For example the likes of ancestry, or TheGenealogist.co.uk for these dates. Then, however, when you come to trying to get back well before the census records and the government run Births, Deaths and Marriages data, you’ll no doubt have found that it is only a very small number of the total genealogical records, that there are, will have actually make it on to the internet.
So you need to go looking for the old Parish Records and they are usually to be found securely in the relevant County Record office. In a very few cases, however, the incumbent minister of the parish may still have kept hold of them at the parish church. A problem that you need to address from the outset is how do you decide which parish your ancestors would have fallen into? This leads me on to the value of getting hold of Parish maps for the counties that your ancestors lived in. The maps will be of use in not only showing the boundaries of each parish, but also in giving you those of the adjacent parishes as well. Think how useful this may be for tracking those ancestors who tended to move about somewhat!
Gaps can occur in the parish registers because of changes in political regime. One such important example is the English Civil War. Think also about how the politics of raising a tax can be a reason for missing parish records. An example of this was that in 1783 a stamp duty of 3 pence on every entry in the parish registers was imposed by the government of the day on its citizens – although an exemption was if a person was a pauper. As with all taxes people seek ways to evade them and so you won’t be surprised that your ancestors did this as well. What is more they did it with the collusion of many church ministers! You will discover that there is a decline in the number of middle and working class entries of baptisms, marriages and burials at this time. On the other hand there is a corresponding increase in the number of pauper’s entries! The Act, itself, was repealed in 1794 as it had been found to be largely unsuccessful in its aim.
Another Act of Parliament (Rose’s Act) in 1812, required baptisms, marriages and burials to be entered in separate and specially printed books. These books provided for only eight entries per page and required more information to be gathered on the individuals than had been the common practice.
Baptismal entries now had to include the occupation of the child’s Father and the Mother’s maiden name. Marriages, from now on, included the parish of origin of both parties to the wedding, also recorded were their names, if they were a bachelor, spinster, widow, etc., their ages, the parties signatures or marks, and also the marks or signatures of two witnesses.
Entries for burials now included the age, occupation and abode of the departed and between 1678 and 1814 an affidavit had to be sworn that the deceased was buried in wool to help the economy or a fine of £5 was payable.
When looking for marriages you should be aware that they can be solemnised in the Church either by banns, or by licence. Family historians, searching for ancestors will find that banns are recorded in the parish register. The reading of banns is the process where the couple’s intention to marry would be read out on three occasions in the parish churches of both parties and it is this which is recorded for us to find. So if you know the place where the bride-groom lived just prior to his marriage, this record will also give you the information as to the parish of his bride. Normally the wedding is likely to take place a few weeks later and so this gives you a time period to search. Marriage Licences themselves will probably not have survived the years as they were sometimes handed to the couple intending to marry. But fear not, because a search can be made for the marriage licence’s bond, or allegation. This is a document that can give up some useful information for family historians as names of those who stood surety, along with the names of the bride and groom, place of marriage and in some cases the occupations of the sureties and groom are recorded.
These are just some of the documents that you can use to help you get your family tree back beyond 1837 in England & Wales. I have released a useful Audio CD on the subject called Getting Back Before 1837 in England & Wales, have a look at the page on my main website http://www.NoseyGenealogist.com
Genealogy search engines are an incredible beginning point when trying to trace you family members line and discover who your ancestors were, what they did in the course of their lives and no matter whether they had produced any essential contributions to the world in any way.
Some genealogy search engines link you to internet sites which have large databases of info about folks from as far back as you are able to imagine, whilst other people make use of their own databases to help you discover the family line you’re trying to find. No matter which one you pick, it is possible to be sure that genealogy search engines can offer you an amazingly large push in the correct direction, even if they do not offer you the right outcomes appropriate off the bat. The key would be to keep in mind that you will find billions of records inside the databases you might be searching, and there may very well be hundreds of thousands of records which match you search criteria. This is why several of the genealogy search engines available let you to enter some information that refines the search even further to offer you precisely the results you are looking for.
1 of the great issues about making use of genealogy search engines is that they usually do not merely supply you having a list of sources. They are able to also lead you to other people that may possibly be looking for the exact same individual, or the identical family line that you simply are looking for. You might then locate that these folks have already observed some resources which you have been struggling to come across, while you are able to present them with data and resources that they have not yet come across. In this way, genealogy search engines provide you with genealogy resources which are proper to your search criteria, also as a network of similar people or people seeking comparable things…you might even be connected to lost cousins and household members along the way.
Whatever the reason is for your search, be certain to use genealogy search engines to create tracing your heritage that a lot less difficult.
Use the following steps to discover your genealogy.
1. Every portion of a family history should be as complete as possible. Strive to assemble a precise account of each family’s history. In the future, we will be the ancestors. Those who follow us will appreciate working with correct and detailed information as they research their family tree.
2. Avoid being a copyist. Do pull together as much documentation as you can for proper evaluation. Just because it is in in print or on the internet does not make it a true statement. Many early family histories were based on incorrect research.
3. A family genealogy, to be useful should cite the sources that were collected in the records. Use a reference bibliography and do your own genealogy research, when ever possible. Another person’s interpretation of the data may not be accurate. Copying another person’s error only makes it that much worse .
Sources of information fall into two categories, secondary and primary. Primary sources are those statements or records, written or verbal, made at or near the time of the event. The information will be an eyewitness or from someone closely associated with the happening. The quest to find primary sources should be obvious. A secondary source comes from someone not present at the time of the event, or from one not closely associated with the occurrence. The recording perhaps would have been made later, from memory. Information sources are found in many places including vital records, census and obituaries.
4. Do not hesitate. Living relatives can provide eye witness versions which may never be found elsewhere.  A life time of “tomorrows’ may be required to find the answer to a question that you should have asked.
5. With records, there are two criteria in judging credibility. Are the records original, or copies? An original record is the first recording of an happening in accordance with the prescribed law or custom.
The event may be noted in more than one original records. The birth of a infant could be recorded in Vital Statistics, in the Church Register, and perhaps in a Family Bible. These records would be considered as originals because, they are the first entry of that birth in that locality. A copied record is one that has been transcribed, compiled, or copied from another record. The other record may have been an original, or it may have been a copy. Whenever a copy is transcribed there is a chance for error. Every new copy, increases the chances of errors.
6. A certified copy is considered an official copy, but it is a copy, and is subject to error. This problem has been reduced with the wide spread use of electronic scanning or photocopying .  A scan of an original record should be considered as good as the original.
7. No genealogy is considered close to completion unless family tree research is done for each individual of the family. No one should be unnoted and no one should be eliminated.
8. A name should be recorded as the entire name. Avoid using ditto marks. Always record the complete names of the children on a family group sheet or in your computer database. When If a person has been known by a name other than the given name, include it.
9. If you find a nickname has been used, such as Betty, on some documents, and or nickname for the same person on other records, ensure you make note of the two names.
10. A child born out of wedlock assumes the mother’s name most frequently.
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.
As someone that has used their website to good effect with my Scottish ancestors, I am really pleased to see that ScotlandsPeople service is now up, revamped and running. I have had no problem in recommending it to those who have Scots roots because of the value of its content. Now it includes some new search features that are designed to make it easier and quicker for people to use and discover their Scottish family roots.
For example, the site now has a way of plotting search results on maps. This should enable all those who are unfamiliar with Scottish geography – such as the many users of Scottish descent living overseas – to better understand about Scotland and their ancestors and how the terrain may have affected them.
Other changes made are to the advanced search functions, that should provide quicker results and the additional information from Catholic Parish Registers.
Anyone who does research will testify to how frustrating it is to follow leads up blind alleys. In terms of genealogy, this could mean following wrong family lines. Anyone who has had a go at genealogy will undoubtedly be familiar with this scenario. It could be that you have been given a bad lead or perhaps misread some information that you have found. Either way, it mounts up to a lot of wasted time.
So how can this pitfall be avoided? Far from giving you a clever answer, I don’t believe that there are any, there are some general tips that I can give that might help you with your genealogy research. In fact the general principles could be applied to any type of research.
The first thing you should always do is keep a track of all of your resources, every book, every article and every web site. And get detailed information too. If your source was a book for example, get all the detail down to the ISBN number. If your research is by word of mouth, write down names, times and dates. Genealogy is all about information, so backing up your facts is critical.
Following a similar theme, you need to organise yourself and your research. File everything and file things where you know how to locate them. You will find yourself back tracking continuously, so make that side of genealogy as painless as possible.
Check your facts. Not just the literal snippets of information that you pick up, but also the logical order of things. Do the facts that you have collected make sense? Apply common sense to all of your findings and question them.
Do not accept carte blanche research from sources you don’t know. What I mean by this is really the types of research that one often sees advertised, offering to write up your family tree for a fee. Beware of these types of offers. The type of research upon which these tress are founded are often questionable. Save your money and do the research yourself. That is after all, part of the fun of genealogy!
If your family has spread it’s wings across borders, be very careful when collecting facts. As one example, dates can be written differently depending on where in the world you are at the time. Easy mistakes can be made under these circumstances. The date 05/04/75 means something different to people in the USA than it does to people in the UK.
Do not make assumptions about any piece of information that you might come across. Stick with the facts that you yourself have collected. One small assumption can lead you in all sorts of directions that you didn’t really want to go down. Remember that we refer to things differently now than we did in years gone by, so when something is taken from letters 100 years ago, it might not mean the same thing to you as it did to your forefathers.
Join up with web sites that have expertise in genealogy. Talk with like minded people and get the benefit of their experience. Not only will they have tips of their own to share to help you, they will have access to sources you might never have thought of. It is well worth your time talking to other genealogists.
Get an extensive look at one of the most remarkable Genealogy Reference Books there is available on the market today. Discover what going on in genealogy today!
DISCLOSURE: Compensated Affiliate of Ancestry.co.uk
Ancestry.co.uk has published online the UK, Casualties of the Boer War, 1899-1902, detailing 55,000 British and colonial soldiers who were killed, wounded, captured, or who died of disease during the Second Boer War.
Highlighting for us the horror of the conflict by detailing over 20,000 deaths of British soldiers along with the injury of a further 23,000. Typically each record details the soldier’s name, rank, force, regiment, battalion and date and place of death, injury or capture.
Most of the other records are of capture or disease, which was rife in South Africa during the early 20th century. Dysentery, typhoid fever and intestine infections were among the most common contagions and account for around 12,000 deaths in the collection.
As well as death through sickness and battlefield injuries, the collection reveals some unusual ‘fates’ met by soldiers. These include records of 86 British troops who were killed or injured by lightning, including a mysterious case of two soldiers struck dead within moments of each other when a lightning storm swept their base in Stormberg near Cape Town. One soldier is even listed as having been eaten by a crocodile at the Usutu River.
As the number of deaths recorded in this collection correspond with the fatalities noted in other historical sources, this archive can be considered one of the most comprehensive resources of British soldiers in the Second Boer War available.
Anyone trying to find out more about an ancestor who fought in the Second Boer War will find these records invaluable, particularly as most British soldiers who fought in the conflict won’t appear in the 1901 Census of England and Wales because they were fighting in South Africa.
These include a number of famous men who were awarded with the Victoria Cross, the highest honour for bravery, upon their return from Africa:
Sir Walter Norris Congreve – Congreve was a hero in both the Boer War and WWI, attaining the rank of general by the end of his 30-year military career. He was awarded his Victoria Cross for defending an abandoned gun emplacement during the Battle of Colenso, where he rescued a fallen comrade under heavy fire despite suffering from gunshot wounds
Charles Fitzclarence – Fitzclarence was decorated for three separate actions of gallantry and became known as one of the fiercest soldiers of the Boer conflict. Major-General Baden-Powell himself even remarked on Fitzclarence’s bravery and importance to the cause. During several sorties Fitzclarence showed ‘coolness and courage’, defying insurmountable odds to defeat the enemy
Henry William Engleheart – After completing a mission to destroy Boer railways behind enemy lines, Engleheart led the extrication through the Boer defences – even stopping to rescue a fallen comrade despite being outnumbered by more than four to one
Following on from the First Boer War, the Second Boer War was a dispute over territory in South Africa, fought between the British Empire and Dutch settlers (known as ‘Boers’ – the Dutch word for ‘farmer’). The catalyst for this secondary conflict was the discovery of gold in the Boer-controlled South African Republic, also known as the Transvaal.
The resulting gold rush encouraged thousands of British settlers (known as uitlanders) to migrate to the republic. Before long the British numbers exceeded those of the Boer, prompting tension around ‘uitlander rights’ and which nation should control the gold mining industry. When the British refused to evacuate their forces in 1899, the Boer declared war.
The so-called ‘Boers’ were farmers who were used to riding and hunting for survival and were therefore considerable opponents for the British Army and claimed the lives of around 8,000 British soldiers. The Boer themselves lost 7,000 troops.
In an attempt to cut off supplies to the Boers, a ‘scorched earth policy’ was introduced. This resulted in the destruction of Boer farms and crops, and subsequent introduction of concentration camps where the Boer and African women, children and workers were interned. Thousands of Boers lost their lives here, primarily through malnutrition and disease.
Ancestry.co.uk International Content Director Dan Jones comments: “These records are a stark reminder of the atrocities of a conflict that is often eclipsed by wars that took place closer to home. They detail a dark and regrettable period of history, but one that should never be forgotten.
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