The Family History Researcher Academy’s English/Welsh Family History Course

 

The Family History Researcher Academy has added to their in-depth English & Welsh Family History Course that reveals the best records and resources for searching for your elusive English or Welsh ancestors

 

 

“Thank you for your detailed study of English research. I have done a lot of English research, yet much of what you have sent is stuff that people don’t know, so thank you very much for your diligence in putting this together.” S Johnston

 

“Great series. Will be reading them again as I work on my English ancestors.” J. Gill

 

Check Website for current offers:

www.FamilyHistoryResearcher.com/course

 

 

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Birth certificate brick walls for family tree researchers


In my recent video for my YouTube Channel I looked at three brick walls a researcher may have finding their ancestors birth certificates in England and Wales.

Mistake number one that people make is to believe that their ancestor would have been registered with the name that they went by for the rest of their life; but this is not always the case.

What if, in between registration and baptism, the parents decided to change the name of the child? It would have been possible, under the law, for them to amend the birth registry by going back to their local registrar to give them the new name – but very few of our ancestors would have actually bothered.

Another thing to look out for is that some people prefer to be known, when they have grow up, by their middle names. Now I know of a family where the father, the mother and all the children all go by their middle names making them impossible to find in the official documentation of census and poll books.

Here is another scenario: let’s say there are two brothers who have two sons roughly about the same time and they both decide to call their sons John, in memory of their grandfather John Snr. Well the two cousins, as they grow up, may want to adopt different names in order to differentiate themselves from their cousin.

 

Mistake number two I like to call ‘Surnames Surprise’.

Where parents are not married then in most cases the birth is recorded under the mother’s surname and usually that’s going to be her maiden name. But consider a case where she is a widow and so her legal surname is that of another man; so that the child will have been registered with that surname because its mother still has that name!

A slight variation to this is where somebody takes their stepfathers name. Maybe you found them in the censuses using the stepfathers name and because when you come to look for the registration you’ll find them registered under the name of their father, who perhaps has now passed away.

 

The third mistake that people make I will call ‘Who’s the father?’

So what if your ancestor never knew their father and then, when they come to their wedding day, what is the name that they are they going to enter (or give to the vicar or the registrar to enter) in the marriage registry? If they don’t know what their father was called then they may well make it up.

Also people can make their fathers names up and their occupations to make themselves more important. I had a case researching a client’s family where we found a soldier marrying in a garrison town. He gave his father as being Colonel Hamish Brown. It turned out, through my research, that his father was actually Reg Brown, a policeman.

Or watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHWXehAelp0

So if you’d like to find out more about how to tease out your elusive English or Welsh ancestors then go to
www.FamilyHistoryResearcher.com

 

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An early Christmas gift

 

.First christmas card

Its starting to feel a bit like Christmas, as I wrap the presents for some of my family today. Once I had finished doing this I thought that I’d better get in the festive mood on the blog as well and so I did a trawl of Wikipedia to find a picture of what is thought to be the first Christmas card produced.

The image above is of that very first in the line of seasonal greetings cards that we all now send. Commissioned by Sir Henry Cole, in 1843, he sold them for a shilling each. Sir Henry is best known as the man who had helped introduce the Uniform Penny Post, in 1840, to Britain and his Christmas card, illustrated by John Callcott Horsley, would have encouraged people to make use of the postal service.

The picture in the middle is meant to depict three generations of a family who are toasting the person to whom the card has been sent, while the other panels show scenes of charitable giving of food and clothing to the poor.

 

As it is the time of year to give gifts I decided that I should drop the price of my best selling English/Welsh family history course at least from now until New Year’s day – as my Christmas present to you.

The English/Welsh Family History course has had tremendous feedback

If  you are struggling to find your English or Welsh ancestors and break down your brick walls, then you would do well to take a look. With this course you will quickly learn where to research on and offline, what resources to use and gain some useful tips and techniques.

To read more click one of the links here and make a seasonal saving:

 

 

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A very Merry Christmas

and a Happy New Year

 

 

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Finding English or Welsh ancestors in the birth records

 

Nick-Thorne-150x150

 

In this video tutorial I look at the 3 mistakes that people new to family history research make when trying to find their English or Welsh ancestors in the births marriages and death indexes published by the General Register Office (GRO).
 
The first and biggest mistake that people make is to not buy the certificate!
 
So why do you need to buy the certificate?

 

Well just assuming that you’ve got the right person, because their name and maybe the place seems right to you, is opening yourself up allowing a huge error creep in your family tree. You could end up adding the wrong John Smith to your family tree and from then on you’re going to be tracing the wrong ancestor. And just think of all that wasted time that you’re going to spend.

 

By buying a certificate this will provide more information that helps you to check if you’ve got the right person. In the video I set out to find an ancestor of my own. I look in the correct quarter in 1865 for Sydney Thorn and I know that he spelt his name with a ‘Y’ and not an ‘I’.
 
looking for english ancestors birth records
 
But if you look carefully at the index page there are two Sydney Thorns. One in Westbury and the other in Totnes. The index is providing me with the information that I need to buy the certificate but what to do of I didn’t know which one of the two Sydneys was the correct one?

 

I could end up tracing a family tree that doesn’t belong to me!

 

The next mistake that many people make when trying to find their English or Welsh ancestors in the births marriages and deaths indexes is using information that they’ve gleaned from somebody else’s family tree and that information has been unchecked against the primary records. So if you are new to this fascinating passtime please please don’t do that.
 
Whatever you do, make sure that you use the information in the other person’s tree as a pointer towards finding the source and check it to make sure that you have got the right people.
 
 
My next tip is to beware of looking in the wrong place, or perhaps being too narrow in your thinking of where an ancestor should be. If you are looking for birth and you think that it should have been in a particular parish and you just can’t find it there, well widen your search to other churches and parishes because our ancestors certainly did move around. I’ve got people in my family tree that I thought should have been in the Devon indexes and yet I found them up in Hampshire while others turned up in London.

 

So do please broaden out your research to other parishes and towns.

 

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Ln3qYNRvXzY

Want more tips and techniques for finding elusive English or Welsh ancestors?

Take a look here:> http://www.FamilyHistoryResearcher.com/trialoffer

One month trial of the Family History Researcher Academy English/Welsh course
Click the Image to take a trial for only £1
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Top Tips for beginning to use English or Welsh Parish Records

Please note: this post contains affiliate links.

Parish Records

 

If you’ve got English or Welsh ancestors, then I’d like to give you my three top tips for using parish records to find them. Perhaps you can’t find your ancestor in the parish records for the village or the town where all the rest of the family are recorded and so this is where you expected to find them also?

 

  1. Have you thought that people did move, even in the olden days? They would go where the jobs are; or maybe they stayed put, but had fallen out with the vicar and have simply found a church which is more appealing to them. So the first tip on my list is to check the surrounding churches.

 

How are you going to find the surrounding parishes whose records you want to investigate? You could turn to this fantastic book that’s called the Phillimore Atlas and Index of Parish Registers. It’s in its third edition, available from various booksellers and genealogy supplies. It has some fantastic maps which show you the different parishes in and around the area that you’re looking at.

The Phillimore Atlas & Index of Parish Registers

2. Another way for you to check for the contiguous parishes to yours, that is the parishes surrounding, is to go over to maps.familysearch.org and then put in the parish or the county that you wish to search for. As an example I’ve decided to Centre on a parish called Ravenstone in the county of Leicestershire. By default it’s gone to give me the parishes within a five-mile radius and it lists them all down the left side. If I just highlight Huggleston and Donington or maybe these ancestors went to Coalville, Woodville, Heather  (spelt ‘Heather’ but it is pronounced Heether) and then there is Normanton le Heath.

maps.familysearch.org

So that is maps.familysearch.org and it covers the parishes for all of England and Wales.

 

3. My third tip is to use a website like TheGenealogist. Why am I using TheGenealogist? Well it has some very cunning little tools that allow you to search for the parents of somebody that is in the baptismal records.

TheGenealogist logo

Now here we’re looking for Mary Ann Evans in Chilvers Coton.

3-tips-to-find-english-and-welsh-ancestors-in-parish-records-mp4_000144713
Who is Mary on Evans? Well if you are literary minded then you might know George Eliot the English novelist, poet, journalists, and translator. She used a male pen name because it meant that her works will be taken more seriously.

Returning to TheGenealogist records, we have the parish records baptism here for Mary Ann and we’re going to click on the icon which gives us the detail that her father’s name is Robert Evans and that her mother’s name is Cristiana Evans. Well I’m going to use this useful  SmartSearch tool here that TheGenealogist have to discover: ‘The parents potential marriage’

3-tips-to-find-english-and-welsh-ancestors-in-parish-records-mp4_000180702_li

With a single click it returns to us the records for any Robert Evans marrying a Christiana and in this case we discover that they didn’t get married in Chilvers Coton, where Mary Ann Evans was baptised. They got married in Astley, Saint Mary the Virgin – which actually is about nine miles down the road. So, there you are, a very very useful facility on this website TheGenealogist.

So if you’d like to find out more about how to tease out your elusive English or Welsh ancestors then take a look at

www.FamilyHistoryResearcher.com


 

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