English county – The Nosey Genealogist's: Help Me With My Family Tree

22/03/201521/04/2015

Fantastic Map Resource for Family Historians

I’ve been having a lot of interesting fun playing with the many maps on the National Library of Scotland site. NLS give access to some historic high-resolution zoomable images of over 91,000 maps of Scotland and beyond.

Initially I was using it to superimpose the old OS 1:10K 1900 map on to the modern satellite image of the plot of a long demolished ancestors house in Fife (see the hatched building in the image on this page). By using the slider, that changes the opacity, I was able to see exactly where the house had been in relation to the ground today. All that remains are the stables and the farm buildings that make up part of the modern farm and no sign from the air of the villa that once stood on the plot.

It is not just maps of Scotland that can be found on this brilliant website as I was able to select an English county and chose between different series of the Ordnance Survey and the modern hybrid view from the air for a village in Leicestershire that I was interested in not to mention the coverage for London.

The better family historians will always try to gather together as much information on their ancestors as possible so as to be able to place their forebears squarely into the contemporary environment in which they lived.

The bare genealogical facts of names, dates and places go only so far to build a family tree, whereas finding out about the social and physical landscapes of your past family’s lives can help you to understand the challenges that faced them.

Landscapes can and did change over time. The enclosure of land and the movement from rural employment to working in the cities, as the industrial process grew had an affect on past generations. The building of the railways and roads, which may have disrupted their lives as well as provided new communication routes for them to travel down can often be seen by looking at various map series over time.

For those of you researching your English/Welsh family history and have hit a brick wall, maps are covered in more detail in a module of the Family History Researcher Academy.

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Learn more about English and Welsh family history resources which can be used to find your elusive ancestors with the Family History Researcher Course,

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18/01/2015

Can you trust this family tree?

I was doing some work on an obscure branch of my family tree this week when I came across a family tree online that included the individual that had married into my family.

Great, I thought, I can quickly get a handle on this person and get some clues as to where he had come from and so on. But casting an eye over the family tree I was disappointed to see that many of the details, such as the dates of birth and death were not backed up with any sources quoted.

For anyone, starting out in researching their family history, an early lesson to learn is that you should never import a family tree that someone else has complied, unless you have checked the details yourself. If the author of the tree does not give you the sources, from where they have obtained the information, then you are not going to be able to check them for yourself and so the best you can do is use the information only as a guide for further research.

Being in an optimistic mood I, nonetheless, jotted down on my scrap pad the names and dates so that I could go and look for them myself. But then it hit me that this family tree had been put together by someone in a haphazard and slapdash way. A birth was attributed to Essex in Massachusetts, when the subject had been born in the English County of Essex. A marriage to a lady rejoicing in the first name of Thomasine reputedly had taken place in 1800. This was impossible as the subject was not born until 1837.

The problem can occur on websites that give suggestions that may or may not be your ancestor and that happen to have the same or a similar name. It seems that some people accept the suggestions as leads to be further investigated and so the family tree may be seen only as a work in progress. They don’t mean it to be used by anyone else, even though it left as Public in the settings.

This is all well and good except that it causes a mighty pitfall for the person new to family history who, having started their own tree on the site, then imports the details as fact and ends up tracing up a line that is not their forebears at all!

In the case of the tree I was looking at it was blatantly obvious that mistakes were made, but in some others it could not be so clear. If you are new to family history research beware of believing all that is written on the internet!

If you are serious about discovering your family history, then spend the winter nights looking for your ancestors in the records.

First you need to know where to look and what tips you need to tease them out.

My Family History Researcher Academy offers a simple to understand course on English/Welsh family history.

I have been sending out weekly tutorials to many satisfied members for some time and this month I had the following from a student who had just completed their 52nd lesson.

“Hi Nick. Thank you very much for this series. I have learnt such a lot and it has increased my knowledge considerably. A. Vallis.

Join the now better informed researchers, such as the family historian above.

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19/11/2011

Cheshire Family Records

I see that Findmypast.co.uk has discovered a number of interesting finds within their newly available local records for Cheshire. The Workhouse records, parish registers, bishop’s transcripts and electoral registers from this English county were published by them recently in what findmypast.co.uk has called ‘The Cheshire Collection.’ It is a series of over ten million historic records that have been provided for them by the Cheshire Archives and Local Studies and which covers more than 350 years of Cheshire history.

One or two of the most interesting are:

– Lewis Carroll’s baptism took place in Daresbury on the 11th of July 1832
– An earthquake hit Cheshire on 18 March 1612
– Ancestors of the James Bond actor, Daniel Craig, sold coal and were iron moulders

A really unusual record that can be found in this collection is that of the ‘peculiar marriage’ between Daniel Broadbent and Martha Cheetham in Mottram-in-Longdendale on 9 March 1780. So what was strange about it? The fact that Daniel was just 23 and Martha was 83 years old! As you would expect death was soon to part them, but if we look at the Mottram registers for just the following year we will find that it was Daniel Broadbent ofÂ Hattersley who was buried on 30 May 1781.

In another record we can find that, on 6 May 1776, 105 year-old George Harding wed Jane Darlington, 75, at St Oswald, Chester.

These unusual marriage records just go to show that, in the 18th century, people found love at any age. However, the records also reveal a darker side of Cheshire’s past, telling several tales of death from the plague.

In 1625 the country fell under an outbreak of the plague that went on to kill 35,000 people. One area that was affected was Malpas in Cheshire. From the online records harrowing accounts of those who were killed by the disease can be found. For example, there was one Richard Dawson of Bradley, whose tale in The Cheshire Collection, is as follows:

“â€¦being sick of the plague and perceiving that he must die at that time arose out of his bed and made his grave and caused his nephew to cast straw into the graveâ€¦ and went and lay him down in the said grave, and caused clothes to be laid upon and so departed out of this worldâ€¦ he died about 28th august, this much I was credibly told.”

Family history records from the ancestors of Daniel Craig and the discovery of the Cheshire earthquake surprised Debra Chatfield, marketing manager at findmypast.co.uk. She commented: “These records make it possible for family historians and local history researchers to delve as far back as 1538, unearthing all sorts of unusual finds quickly and easily at their fingertips. Who would have known that Cheshire was hit by an earthquake in 1612 or that James Bond’s ancestors sold lumps of coal?”

Jonathan Pepler, County Archivist for Cheshire Archives and Local Studies,Â said: “This is a very exciting development for everyone interested in Cheshire and its rich history.”

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Tag: English county

Fantastic Map Resource for Family Historians

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Can you trust this family tree?

My Family History Researcher Academy offers a simple to understand course on English/Welsh family history.

“Hi Nick. Thank you very much for this series. I have learnt such a lot and it has increased my knowledge considerably. A. Vallis.

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Cheshire Family Records

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My Family History Researcher Academy offers a simple to understand course on English/Welsh family history.

“Hi Nick. Thank you very much for this series. I have learnt such a lot and it has increased my knowledge considerably. A. Vallis.

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