Tag: Family Tree

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Meritorious Service Medals can be searched online

Disclosure: Please note this post contains affiliate links.*

 

TheGenealogist has released the records of 29,000 individuals who were decorated with the Meritorious Service Medal (MSM). The roll of names for those who were awarded this British honour in the First World War have been released by TheGenealogist. Researchers can now look for holders of this medal up to 1920 from within their ever growing military records collection.

  • See a copy of the image of the Medal Card with the theatre of war where the medal was won
  • Details the name, rank, regiment and service number
  • Unique “SmartSearch” links to the comprehensive military records on TheGenealogist.co.uk
  • These new records cover British servicemen from The First World War

The medal was first awarded in 1845 to non-commissioned officers in the British Army who had a record of long service in the forces. Given originally for long service of at least 20 years to servicemen who were of irreproachable character and already held the Long Service and Good Conduct Medal of their service, the First World War saw it awarded to those who performed acts of non-combatant gallantry in the performance of their military duty. In the second case the bravery was not necessarily while the serviceman was on active service and may have been in the saving or attempted saving of the life of an officer or an enlisted soldier.

Family history researchers searching for ancestors who had been awarded the Meritorious Service Medal in the First World War will be able to find their forebears in this new addition to the military collection of records on TheGenealogist.

 

 

 

Read TheGenealogist’s article on a First World War NCO awarded his medal ‘For exceptionally good work’ operating night and day to keep the RFC’s aeroplanes at El Hammam flying:

https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2018/finding-ancestors-awarded-the-meritorious-service-medal-768/

 

 

*Disclosure: Please note this post contains affiliate links. This does not mean that you pay more just that I make a percentage on the sales from my links. The payments help me pay for the cost of running the site. You may like to read this explanation here:

http://paidforadvertising.co.uk/

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Can’t find the baptism?

I was reviewing a problem ancestor in my family tree this week and thought my notepad jottings may help others.

I am looking for a female ancestor who was born before the introduction of civil registration in 1837. According to every census, that she was enumerated within, her birth date was 1806, give or take a year. The place of birth remained consistent as Bigbury in Devon. The problem is that she does not appear in the Bigbury parish register for baptisms for 1806, nor for the years either side. There is someone with her Christian name in the registers, however by following this woman through to her marriage and death I have ruled her out.

 

This being the case I have to consider reasons why I can’t find my ancestor and so I noted down on a pad the scenarios that I needed to explore.

1. Was my ancestor disguising her age in the census to appear closer in years to her husband?   – If so I need to expand my search for her using a larger range of years.

2. Was her maiden surname different from what I had discovered from a transcript of her marriage? Perhaps the name I was searching for was from a previous marriage?  – To find this out I needed to see an image of the parish register and read whether it said Spinster or Widow at the time of her wedding.

3. Was she mistaken about being born in Bigbury? Perhaps she grew up there and assumed that it was where she had been born? – I needed to search the Bigbury parish register to see if any other family members with her surname were baptised, married or buried there.

4. Has the Bishop’s transcripts survived in the Diocesan Archive? – Sometimes entries may appear in the BTs that are missing from the actual parish register.

5. Was she from a non-conformist family and been baptised by a minister of another denomination other than the Established Church? – A search of the non-conformist registers may turn up my elusive ancestor, though not all of them were surrendered and so the collection at The National Archives is not complete. Some may be in the Devon Heritage Centre (County Record Office) while others are lost.

6. Could I find any siblings in the Bigbury area? – Searching first for baptisms, then marriages and burials. In this case I found her as a witness to a marriage of a woman with the same surname. Perhaps her sister, or a cousin. But it does establish a link to Bigbury.

7. Did she appear in anyone else’s published family tree? – Though they are notoriously inaccurate family trees that are published online may give you clues to go and research for yourself and confirm the accuracy of the information in the tree.

8. Does anyone seem to share the DNA with me from that area or from an ancestor with that surname? – Look for a distant cousin that has entered the information about their ancestors to a linked family tree on a family history DNA website.

This is not an exhaustive list, but it is a start to breaking down a brick wall.

 

How far have I got? Not as far as I’d like, as so many other things have got in the way of my research this week!

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Genealogy-art.com for your own beautiful family tree

Genealogy Art stand at the WDYTYA? LIVE 2017
Genealogy Art stand at the WDYTYA? LIVE 2017

It was a pleasure, while gathering new ideas from the stands at the Who Do You Think You Are? Live show at the NEC, to come across Wladimir Carlos Ledochowski and his Genealogy Art stand. I like to find new ways to display my research into my ancestors and this exhibitor certainly demonstrated how he can take a person’s research and turn it into really beautiful family tree.

Wladimir was promoting his work to the visiting family historians at the show and I got him to explain a bit more about the number of products that he offers that can help you display your family tree in such an attractive way. Watch the video here or contact him via his website at www.genealogy-art.com.

 

 

 

If you are still completing your research into your English or Welsh ancestors then before creating your family tree do make sure that you have got the most details gathered that you can.

Nick, The Nosey Genealogist, who carried out this interview, has an extremely well received family history course that can quickly give you the tools to track down your ancestors. Check out the links in the sidebar to the right of this page to pay in US, Canadian, Australian or New Zealand Dollars or buy in sterling with this link: www.familyhistoryresearcher.com/trialoffer

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Hilarious mistakes in a family tree!

Family Tree on a computer

I was looking for some clues this week about which branch of a family to pursue, while researching someone’s family tree for them.

I did a quick trawl of the online offerings, to see if I could get some pointers as to which direction my research should go and which of two cousins to concentrate on.

We all get taught that we should NEVER take someone else’s research and add it into our own tree without verifying the information in the records.

I may, however, look to see what others may have found before me as a clue to which people I need to research in the primary records. But I always scan to see what sources they have added to their tree, to back up their research. If there are few records cited – or worse still, none at all – then my in built BS meter tends to go off in my brain.

Unfortunately, too many people don’t seem to approach ancestor research with a healthy dose of scepticism for what they have found online and so the web based family trees can be a great example of people’s fantasy being passed off as truth.

Online family history research

I was once bombarded by messages from someone who thought that doing genealogy was simple. They willy nilly grabbed people with the same names as their ancestors and completed their tree in no time at all. When I raised with them the subject of proof they became very annoyed with me. To them “it stands to reason” that X was the father of Y and that there was no need to waste our time proving it.

Sorry, that is so wrong!

I do think that it is acceptable to take a look and see if we can get some clues for our own research from what others have done, but sometimes I am speechless at what I find published in an online tree.

This week I found that someone had made public their family tree with a line going back to the eighteenth century. Supposedly, if you believed their tree, one of their female ancestors had been born in 1779, got married 8 years before she was born, had a son when she was 3 years old and then died in two different places!

Perhaps this was a work in progress and they were entering possible candidates into the tree before checking the records to verify if they had the right person. In this case it must, surely, have been obvious they were barking up the wrong tree. I just wonder how they were not embarrassed to have this nonsense publicly available for all to see?

Lesson from all this, for those new to family history research, don’t make your tree public if it contains daft speculation!

 

Take a look at Genealogical Proof on the Amazon store, some books are very reasonably priced: http://amzn.to/2lVoZYO

 

My own English/Welsh family history course includes a module examining genealogical proof.

Family History Researcher Academy

 

Compensated Affiliate Link to Amazon.co.uk used above.

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How Many People Are You Actually Related To?

Family tree as a wheel

 

A guest article this week as I found this fascinating…

How Many People Are You Actually Related To?
By Connor Kehl

Most people think of a Family Tree like a triangle. It starts with you and then branches out downward from there, starting with your children and then your grandchildren, and so on. The lesser looked at side is the other direction. Starting from you and moving up. This makes an upside down triangle. There’s you, then your two parents above you, then each of their two parents above them, and so forth. As you keep moving up a generation the number of ancestors, or the number of people it took to create you, doubles. If you know anything about exponential growth, you will realize this number can get very large very quickly.

If you were to go back seven generations (your great-great-great-great-great grandparents) you would have 128 ancestors. This generation would have been in their 20’s in approximately 1800-1825, which means if you traveled to the year 1820 there would be 128 people walking around all making up an equal 1/128th of who you will become in 200 years.

Now let’s go back 12 generations. You would have to say “great” 10 times before saying “grandparents”. These people would be in their 20’s, in about the second half of the 1600’s, and again if you traveled to that time, there would be 4,096 people that make up who you are.

Now if you continue to double your ancestors, eventually you will surpass the world population, which obviously isn’t possible. This is why there is a widest part of your family tree. This part of your family tree happens in about the year 1200, where you are related to almost the entire world population. This means that everyone alive today has many common ancestors from that time.

If you continue to go backwards your family tree begins to get smaller. The reason for this is because hundreds of years ago people didn’t tend to meet as many people in their lives. Transportation wasn’t what it is today and big cities weren’t a thing, so the people in the small village you lived in tended to be your only contact. This would mean that someone could have two ancestors that were very closely related to them. For instance, if two cousins got married (which was far more common back then because of the proximity issue) than their child would only have 6 great-grandparents, instead of 8.

So if you think about it, if you are a descendant from that many people, odds are somewhere up your family tree is a king or queen or someone really cool and important. If anyone tries to brag to you that they are somehow related to King Henry VIII or something, you can just tell them that you probably are too. He just might be your 19th cousin or something ridiculous like that.

If you like this article, want to read more articles like this, want to learn some interesting things, or just like random facts, check out Connor’s website – http://www.possiblyusefulinfo.com

Or his favourite/favorite page: http://www.possiblyusefulinfo.com/interesting-things.html

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/expert/Connor_Kehl/2157335
http://EzineArticles.com/?How-Many-People-Are-You-Actually-Related-To?&id=9108290

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Find your elusive ancestors in the online and offline records. Discover where to look and what records sets to use in the English/Welsh family history course from The Family History Researcher Academy.

You can take advantage of a Special Offer Trial of just £1 for a month!

You’ll receive 4 modules plus bonus content by going to: http://www.familyhistoryresearcher.com/trialoffer/

 

OR to pay in US dollars simply Click this link:

http://www.familyhistoryresearcher.com/specialoffer

(Normal monthly subscription: £9.95 per month(or $14.00). Course length: 52 weekly downloadable tutorials to do at your own pace. You are free to cancel at any time.)

One month trial of the Family History Researcher Academy English/Welsh course
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Fantastic new Family Tree software for PC and Mac

I’ve been testing this great piece of software and I’m impressed!

It is a comprehensive multi-platform package that keeps your tree backed up online with stunningly versatile charts and reports. For all those who are looking for family tree software in the light of all the uncertainty in the market recently, then this is most welcome news from S&N Genealogy Supplies:

Revolutionary new multi-platform Family Tree software for PC and Mac

TreeView

TreeView has been designed by family historians to fill the gap for a powerful, intuitive and feature packed family tree program that is easy to use from the outset. TreeView stores your family tree on your computer with the option to easily sync your tree with TreeView.co.uk and TheGenealogist.co.uk . There is also a free iOS and Android app allowing you to keep your family history at your fingertips! Privacy options for your online tree allows you to retain complete control over your research.

Powerful Features
  • TreeView syncAccess your data wherever you are by syncing your tree between the software and all of your mobile devices at the click of a button.
  • Navigate your family tree using a variety of different views including pedigree, family, ancestors, descendants, hourglass, fan and even a full tree view.
  • Create beautiful charts and detailed reports in seconds
  • Easily add details of your ancestors by attaching facts, notes, images, addresses, sources and citations.
  • View your entire tree on screen, or zoom in to a single ancestor.
  • Quickly discover how different people in your family tree are related using the relationship calculator.
  • Identify anomalies in your data with the problem finder.
  • Map out your ancestors lives – use the map view to track your ancestors life events across the world.
  • Import or export your family tree using the GEDCOM standard.

Pedigree View - one of TreeView’s 9 navigational views

[Pedigree View – one of TreeView’s 9 navigational views]

TreeView has received praise from both genealogy reviewers and users:

Reviewers:

Chris Paton, professional genealogist, writer and blogger:

  • “One of the most versatile family history software products now available”
  • “Navigating around TreeView is extremely straightforward”

Nick Peers, genealogy writer and blogger:

  • “It keeps your research file in sync with the web via TheGenealogist hosted tree, as well as your iPad, iPhone or Android device”

Users:

  • “I am so impressed with Treeview, I will be using it for my own research, it is so easy and user friendly, and has all the facilities you could wish for.”
  • “A comprehensive multi-platform package that keeps your tree backed up online with stunningly versatile charts and reports.”
  • “It’s quick to load and speedy in use”
  • “I particularly like the mapping facility”

Maps View - showing all event locations for a particular individual

[Maps View – showing all event locations for a particular individual]

TreeView allows you to create beautiful charts with a variety of ways to present your family tree. Choose from a range of drag and drop charting options and decide which facts to display. Charts include: Ancestors; Descendants; Fan; Circle; Full Tree; Hourglass and Pedigree. The software allows you to personalise your charts by adding photographs and customising the background with an image or a colour of your choice.

TreeView’s drag and drop charting feature showing a full tree with both foreground and background images

[TreeView’s drag and drop charting feature showing a full tree with both foreground and background images]

You can also create detailed reports in TreeView, including Individual, Family and Narrative reports. These can either be printed or exported as a PDF or RTF file (a cross-platform document that can be opened by most word processors) for further editing.

TreeView’s Narrative report showing three generations

[TreeView’s Narrative report showing three generations]

TreeView is a powerful easy to use family tree program that comes with a host of useful features including charts, reports and maps. You can sync to the cloud and your mobile devices whilst also having the ability to work offline when you have no internet connection. TreeView’s privacy options allow you to keep full control of your data when storing your tree in the cloud, for extra peace of mind.

There are three versions of TreeView available:

  • Free Edition – Includes essential features, with no limits on the number of individuals or the amount of data you can add
  • Basic Edition (Download only, £24.95) – Adds support for:
    • Charting
    • Reporting
  • Premium Edition (CD & DVD, £39.95) – Includes all features of TreeView Basic, plus:
    • 4 Month Diamond Subscription to TheGenealogist.co.uk (Worth £59.95!)
    • Printed Quick Start Guide
    • Cassell’s Gazetteer of Great Britain & Ireland 1893 (Worth £16.95!)
    • Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography (Worth £16.95!)
    • English, Welsh & Scottish Landowners 1873 (Worth £36.90!)
    • Irish Landowners 1876 (Worth £12.95!)

Go to TreeView.co.uk today and find out more.

More images from TreeView…

TreeView Full Tree View with Easy Zoom

[TreeView Full Tree View with Easy Zoom]

Relationship View showing how two people are related

[Relationship View showing how two people are related]

Chart Examples

TreeView Circle Chart with background and foreground images]

[TreeView Circle Chart with background and foreground images]

TreeView Descendent Chart with background and foreground images

[TreeView Descendent Chart with background and foreground images]

TreeView Descendent Chart with background and foreground images

[TreeView Full Tree Chart with background and foreground images]

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I found an ancestor in the Wolverhampton City Archives

 

Wolverhampton City Archives

 

I’ve been visiting the Midlands for the New Year and on the last day of 2015 I marked the occasion with a visit to the Wolverhampton City Archives.

I am so glad that I decided to see if they were open as I managed to discover something interesting about a person in my family tree that I didn’t know before then.

I had identified that a great-grand uncle of mine, Major Robert D D Hay, had become the Chief Constable of the Wolverhampton Borough Police in around 1866. In fact I had got the completely wrong dates for his tenure, but the knowledgeable staff in the archives were able to find me an entry in their catalogue for a newspaper report that put me on the correct track. The correct date was 1878 that he had been appointed to the job.

In the interest of discovering something about the Major’s wife I asked the archive staff if they had anything about Mary Hay, neé Corser, whom I believed may have been a local Wolverhampton girl. Entering her name they showed me entries that suggested that she may have been the daughter of a local solicitor and attorney called Charles Corser and another link that revealed the fascinating fact that she had founded a home in the late nineteenth century as a shelter for homeless girls where they could learn a trade.

The archive staff explained to me what the home was established for and it certainly made perfect sense for the wife of the Chief Constable to have founded the institution. The man behind the desk seemed himself to be intrigued to discover that the Mrs Hay, of the Mrs Hay Memorial Home for Friendless Girls, had been the wife of the borough’s chief policeman.

It turns out that the home had been set up by my Victorian middle-class great-grand aunt who, like many of her class, feared that prostitution, that was rife among the desperately poor working class women of the city, was in danger of undermining the fabric of their own level of society. This, they concluded, was because of the temptation prostitutes held for their own middle class men and so the solution they came up with was to take the girls off the streets and teach them a trade other than the oldest profession!

 

In my course on English/Welsh family history I always encourage those who want to discover more about their ancestors to explore the records that the county record offices and city archives have as many of their holdings have not made it online. While there certainly is a lot of records to explore online now, there are often some smaller collections that can help you find out more about your family. To find them you very often have to pay a visit to the repositories in the area that your ancestor lived in and ask the staff what holdings they suggest may help you find out more.

 

While I was in the City Archives I was also able to take a look at the original Chief Constable’s report to the Watch Committee. While it was a later book than my own ancestor had compiled, it still gave me a fascinating insight into the running of a Victorian police force and I felt privileged to be able to turn the pages of the old ledger and read about some of concerns of the Chief Constable. Within its pages were the names of various PCs on sick leave; the names of officers facing disciplinary proceedings and the recommendations (or otherwise) for lodging house licences and so on.

Looking at the Chief Constable s report Wolverhampton City Archives

 

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Hit a brick wall with your English/Welsh ancestors?

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New Book: In Search of Our Ancient Ancestors

I was very pleased to hear from Anthony Adolph this week, about his new book In Search of Our Ancient Ancestors: from the Big Bang to Modern Britain, in Science and Myth especially as I had just been reading all about it in Your Family Tree Magazine and was intrigued as the magazine review called it ‘unusual and fascinating’.

In Search of our Ancient Ancestors

 

The following is written by the author:

I am delighted to announce the publication of my new book In Search of Our Ancient Ancestors: from the Big Bang to Modern Britain, in Science and Myth, which is being published by Pen and Sword this month.

According to science, life first appeared on Earth about 3,500 million years ago. Every living thing is descended from that first spark, including all of us. But if we trace a direct line down from those original life-forms to ourselves, what do we find? What is the full story of our family tree over the past 3,500 million years, and how are we able to trace ourselves so far back?

From single celled organisms to sea-dwelling vertebrates; amphibians to reptiles; tiny mammals to primitive man; the first Homo sapiens to the cave-painters of Ice Age Europe and the first farmers down to the Norman Conquest, this book charts not only the extraordinary story of our ancient ancestors but also our 40,000 year-long quest to discover our roots, from ancient origin myths of world-shaping mammoths and great floods down to the scientific discovery of our descent from the Genetic Adam and the Mitochondrial Eve. 

In Search of Our Ancient Ancestors will tell you where you come from, before the earliest generations of your family tree that you can trace using records. It also saves you having to think any harder about what to buy for your family and friends this Christmas!

I do hope you will enjoy it.  Anthony Adolph.

 

Anthony Adolph’s book is available from the publishers, Pen & Sword books, and all good booksellers.

Click here to buy now:

In Search of Our Ancient Ancestors

In Search of our Ancient Ancestors

 

 

 

Compensated links used in this post: http://paidforadvertising.co.uk/

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Frank Gardner’s family history shows a direct line to the Conqueror

William the Conqueror

Last Thursday night, on BBC TV, saw what many people on my facebook page are saying was the best programme in the 12th UK series of Who Do You Think You Are so far. The subject was Frank Gardner, the BBC’s Security Correspondent who made the news himself in June 2004 when he was shot six times and seriously wounded by al-Qaeda sympathisers in Saudi Arabia.

It was his maternal family tree, that was the subject of the one hour show. It would seem to have delighted those viewers that have commented on social media because, while it did pick out certain key ancestors to look at in more detail, the episode went on to trace Frank’s line as far back as the research would take them. This happened to be to William the Conqueror himself and so it more than validated the family story, that Frank had heard as a child from his mother, that they were descended from the Normans.

You certainly couldn’t have wanted to find a better ancestor than the Norman King, if you were trying to prove that your family came over with the Normans! Without any shadow of a doubt William, Duke of Normandy, is one Norman that no one can dispute arrived in England at that time.

 

The satisfaction of being able to trace one generation back to another and then back to another, and so on for 31 generations, is something that very few of us can have the gratification of being able to do. Yet I was asked by a contact this weekend if I had noticed that it was often a pretty zig-zag line that was taken. The lineage, they had spotted from the pedigree shown on the screen, would meander back though the mother of an ancestor and then her mother. The next generation back was again via the female line and then, perhaps, the male branch for a couple of generations before going up the female line again.

“How could the Herald at the College of Arms have told Frank that he was directly descended from William the Conqueror?”

“Because he is!” I replied, nonplussed. “A direct line does not mean everyone has to have the same surname and be descended from the male. Women are just as important as ancestors to us all.”

I believe that this is a mistake that many may make in their family tree research. Unintentionally concentrating on charging back up one line following the father, the grandfather to trace the surname back. This can even happen if our quest started with a woman.

It takes two to create an offspring and the child, we know now, receives half their DNA from each parent. So take time to investigate some of your female lines and see where they take you. You too may be as lucky as Frank Gardner in your discoveries.

 

TheGenealogist website’s researchers have also turned up an interesting fact about the journalist’s dad.

Read their featured article here about Frank Gardner’s James Bond like father.

 

Read the featured article on Frank Gardner at TheGenealogist.co.uk

 

 

 

The Genealogist - UK census, BMDs and more online

Compensated affiliate links used in the post above http://paidforadvertising.co.uk/

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Add colour to family history facts to make ancestors lives interesting

 

Census 1861

I was at a function recently and on my table was an enthusiastic family historian who had been tracing his family tree for many years. Next to him was the inevitable sceptic who tried to put us both in our place by saying just how boring she thought “gathering a load of names and dates was”. I didn’t enquire what her hobby was, or even if she had one at all.

I did surprised her, however, by agreeing and saying that one of my mantras that I repeat often in my contributions to the Family History Researcher Academy course is to find out about the lives, work, environment and social conditions that existed at the time that your forebears were alive.

If you have discovered, from a search of the census, that your Great Aunt Jane was in service in a large house then I would make an effort to go and visit the below stairs of a similar property. There are quite a few National Trust houses that meet the bill. On a visit to Erdigg in North Wales, this was exactly what I did. There the upstairs and downstairs were beautifully presented to give a feel for what life was like for our ancestors living in both levels of society.

Erdigg

As a worked example of what I teach, let’s consider my ancestor Henry Thomas Thorne. From the census of 1861, accessed on TheGenealogist  I am able to discover him working in the Naval Dockyard at Portsmouth where he is employed as a rope-maker at H.M.Dockyard.

1861 Portsmouth census

 

This weekend I had the chance to visit Portsmouth and not only go to the church where he married, but also to tour the Historic Dockyard and see an exhibit explaining how men like my 2x great-grandfather and his colleagues created the cordage that the Royal Navy of the time required for its ships.

I had previously obtained a copy of my ancestors’ wedding certificate from the GRO, having found their details in the Births, Marriages and Death Indexes that are available on various websites.

St Mary's Portsea

On this visit to Portsmouth I could now walk in the footsteps of my forebears on their wedding day the 5th February 1859 at St Mary’s, Portsea Island.HMS Warrior 1860

I could go on board H.M.S. Warrior, an actual warship from the time period (1860) and see how the cordage that he made was used on this ironclad steam and sail man-of-war.

Coiled rope

And I could see the tools that Henry would have used everyday, in the exhibition piece there.

Ropemaking

This story of my weekend excursion illustrates how I use the information that I discover in the records as a springboard to go on and find social history museums, or even the actual places that my ancestors would have gone to, and so build my family’s story.

If you haven’t moved past the gathering of names and dates stage in your family tree research, then I urge you to start doing so now.

 

 

The Genealogist - UK census, BMDs and more online

Compensated affiliate links used in the post above http://paidforadvertising.co.uk/

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