Did you see June Brown on the BBC’s new series of “Who Do You Think You Are?” last night?
It was really interesting in the number of generations of her Jewish line that they were able to trace. I was fascinated by the different countries they had to go and research in, as each generation moved on, sometimes by being forced out and sometimes for economic reasons. If you missed it the countries included the Barbary Coast of North Africa, present day Algeria, Italy, Holland and England.
Not only was it revealing of June’s family history but it shone a light on a wider history of the times and, as she said in the programme, “the wandering Jew”. Wandering because they had to, not by choice.
Has the BBC’s ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ got you interested in researching your own family history? Findmypast.com are offering you 10% off subscriptions. You’ll have access to over 850 years’ worth of records including complete census, births, deaths, marriages, military and many more specialist records. Start searching for your ancestors now!
If you are trying to research your family tree in Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney, Sark or Herm then you’ll be pleased to know that Pen & Sword Books have brought out a useful paperback called: Tracing Your Channel Islands Ancestors. Marie-Louise Backhurst has written an expert introduction for the family historian tracing forebears from these islands which, while not part of the United Kingdom owe alligiance to the English Crown. Indeed, the author refers to them as being officially “Islands in the British Seas”.
For those who need to trace their family history within these self-governing smaller British Isles, where the laws and customs are sometimes very different from the “mainland”, then this work will point you to the wealth of material available to researchers in libraries and archives in Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney and Sark. As an example, civil birth, marriage and death records are different in format from those in England and Wales. The family history researcher will also find that they are only available in the islands themselves and the book gives the reader full information on how to gain access to them.
Marie-Louise Backhurst sets out to cover the census data, church records, nonconformist registers, rating lists, newspapers, wills and inheritance, official records, as well as a variety of other sources which can help top flesh out a Channel Island ancestor’s life. As migration has played a large part in the history of the Channel Islands the details of these records are fully explained within its pages.
This authoritative and easy-to-use guide to these collections, and the author’s advice on how to use them and get the most out of them, will be invaluable to anyone who is trying to find out about the life and experience of an ancestor who lived in the Channel Islands, or was connected with the. Available from The Printed Word Bookshop and all good bookshops
Following on from the series earlier in the year on researching family history in Jersey, we turn our attention south to France.
Over the centuries there has been considerable immigration into Jersey from France. The principal waves of immigrants arrived firstly as a result of Huguenots fleeing around the time that the Edict of Nantes was revoked in 1685; secondly as a result of political uncertainty during the period after 1789; and thirdly as a result of famine and rural poverty in Brittany and western Normandy from about 1850 onwards. The last wave was the largest of the three, with some thousands of people arriving and settling – and consequently there are a substantial number of Jersey families who have a French connection.
Aliens’ registration cards (those issued under legislation passed in 1920 are in the Archive catalogue in series D/S/B, and the registers that accompany them are in series D/S/C. Those relating to French nationals present during the Occupation are at reference D/S/A/24)
If available, records of public bodies such as the courts, the prison and the hospital (all of whom would want this information for accounting purposes). These could be your best bet if your ancestors arrived in the early part of the third wave
French law set a series of benchmarks in 1803 as to what needed to be recorded to legalise registration of births, marriages and deaths, much as England did in 1837. Part of this was that every commune had to keep a book recording births marriages and deaths. The book would cover ten years: there would be an index to every year and an overall index for the whole ten year book. While the entries are numbered one-up each year and include births, marriages and deaths in a single numbering sequence, the indexes for birth, marriage and death are separate.
We are looking at the book covering 1843 to 1852 so we find it among the 17 books listed and click the image, then we click the image on the right-hand side of the page. This launches the viewer software.
We actually need to start not at the first page but at the last page – the tables decennales covering all ten years’ worth of entries are there. Working backwards we start with the deaths, then come to the marriages, then the births.
A more typical entry is that for the marriage of Jean-Pierre Le Gentil in 1844. There is a format to entries: each entry always begins with the date (and indeed the hour of day), and is followed by the name of the official and his credentials (usually the mayor). In the case of a marriage we then have the prospective husband, his date and place of birth, where he is living and the names of his parents. In this case his mother has died and the necessary papers have been presented to prove it. At the end of that you spot the phrase d’une part; this means that what follows is the same details for the prospective wife. The rest of the documentation is the legal wording affirming that the marriage has been notified and legally witnessed, and also gives the names of the witnesses.
While I was taking a break from researching my family tree I took a look at a finance site this morning. My attention was drawn, because of my interest in Family History, towards a report on Investors.com about a stock that’s been one of the market’s big winners during the past year and a half in the USA.
It is, of course, Ancestry.com Inc. the group of family history web sites, including Ancestry.co.uk, that many of us use or have probably used in the past to dig into our family tree and dig up things like births, marriages and deaths, census record and more. It became listed in November 2009 and so it is considered to be relatively new to the market.
But already Investors.com reveals that:
” … a lot of people seem to be interested in that information. Sales growth ranged from 36% to 41% during the past four quarters.
* Earnings growth has had some big swings, but came in at a hefty 125% last quarter.
* Looking ahead, analysts see earnings rising 51% this year and 30% next year.
* The stock’s Relative Strength Rating is 96. That rating compares Ancestry’s price performance to the rest of the market. So Ancestry is outperforming 96% of the other stocks in the market.
* Still, its Accumulation/Distribution Rating is a D-. So some big investors have been selling the stock.”
All this shows that, across the world, people like us are so taken by the Family History bug that we are willing to spend money in the pursuit of our hobby.
Now I know, from feed back on my blog and on my facebook page, that some people believe that the subscriptions to sites like these are getting out of their reach. It would seem that the Israeli owned MyHeritage may have understood this trend in the market as it is reported on another website I found called Businessinsider.com, that they are developing a way to share the costs of subscriptions to their site.
MyHeritage, which makes it money from advertising as well as premium subscriptions has a quite clever way of getting family history researchers to pay for premium subscriptions to its site and that is to encourage your friends and family to chip in.
According to Business Insider:
“You can create a “Family Goal” to encourage other family members to subscribe.
This has some precedent, in different ways, in online fundraising campaigns, which encourage donors to reach a goal, and in group buying. Obviously it makes sense in a genealogy site, where a family may be involved in matching their heritage, but it can also make sense for any site that is used by a group (for example a group publishing platform).
It’s a clever mechanic, and it will be interesting to see whether it works for MyHeritage and whether other social sites implement something similar.”
It was not just the rich who would leave a will in the Britain of the past. For this reason, family historians looking into their family tree, should consider it worth researching whether their ancestor did so. This area of family history research is often recorded as Wills and Administrations.I will write about Administrations in another post concentrating today on Wills.
Technically what we refer to in common speech as a ‘will’ is in fact a joint deed that is legally known as ‘The Last Will and Testament’ of the person who has died and it was in 1540 that in England it came into existence. From that date on a party could now devise, or gift, their ‘Freehold’ land by the means of a will.
In order for a deceased’s wishes to be carried out an executor, or executrix, would need to be appointed by the departed to administer and distribute their estate after their death. The executor/executrix would need to apply to a court for the will to be carried out and that court would have to be satisfied the will was valid and that it was the deceased’s final will, and testament. This is the process known as “proving a will”. When satisfied the court then issues a grant of probate that allowed the executors to finally carry out the will’s terms and distribute the deceased’s property.
Before 1540, in England, a testament was only concerned with what is known as “personality” or personal property, which is a person’s moveable goods and chattels. This was because a person’s interests in any “real property” (that is the land and any buildings that they owned) would automatically descended to the
deceased’s immediate heir, normally the first son. Ecclesiastical law, however, held that at least one-third of a man’s property should pass to his widow as her dower and then another one-third should go to all his children.
As you delve into this area of family history you may possibly come across something called a nuncupative will, or perhaps you will see it referred to as an oral will. If you consider that in some places, in years gone by, very few people other than the clergy could read and write. So if your ancestor was dying, with no one available with the skill to write down his wishes, then the court may have relied on the deceased’s oral declaration of their last wishes to another party. Probate would only be granted after the courts had listened to the sworn evidence of those persons who had heard that declaration being made.
As I am sure we can all imagine, this sort of will would often lead to disputes. Needless to say nuncupative wills were made invalid in England by the Wills Act of 1837. There being one exception, however, and that is in the case of members of the armed forces on active duty, for whom they are still legal today.
You can tell such wills apart in the records, as they can usually be identified because they start with the word: Memorandum.
A holographic will, on the other hand, is a will and testament that has been entirely handwritten and signed by the testator. In the United Kingdom, unwitnessed holographic wills remained valid in Scotland up until the Requirements of Writing Scotland Act 1995. This Act of Parliament abolished the provision and so such wills written after 1st August 1995 are now invalid in all of England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland.
Family historians, may well find that the ancestor that they though would just not have written a will, may well have done so. Consider that even if your ancestor was not wealthy, but a person who owned the tools of a trade, then they may well have wanted to make sure that these were passed on to the right person.
Another lesson that I have learnt is that finding wills can be difficult. I had searched many times, over the years, in various online places before I found the probate for my 2x great-grandfather on the recently available Ancestry Wills & Probate data.
Henry Thomas Thorne, for forty years worked on the River Dart first as the steersman of the railway ferry the Perseverance and then as captain of the GWR Steamer The Dolphin making the short crossing between Kingswear and Dartmouth. He died in 1908 and left effects of £202 17 shillings. That’s about £15,700.00 now, using the retail price index.
As with all family history research, don’t give up on blanks in your family tree, simply resolve to return to unfruitful searches at regular intervals as more data becomes available all the time.
Most people researching their family tree in the British Isles will eventually get past the census collections and the civil registrations and must now turn to the Parish records to proceed further. While, recently, there has been a great many more parish register collections being made available through the subscription sites, it is still not the case that a family historian will definitely find their ancestors parish has been uploaded online. Getting back before 1837 in England & Wales needs researchers to know where to look for the relevant details
Even if, however, we accept that we may need to make a visit to a physical archive, in order to push our research on, then we can certainly turn to the internet in order to locate where the parish records are. As well as this the web can undoubtedly save our selves time, when we do make the visit to the particular County Record Office or other archive, by being able to gain information provided by their website beforehand. In some cases they may even have their catalogue online which would allow us to do essential homework such as finding call numbers for the documents that we wish to look at and perhaps even ordering them up before we arrive.
In most cases, probably as much as ninety-nine percent of the time, we will find that the Parish Records for our ancestors have by now been deposited at the County Record Office, while a rare few will still be at the church in the care of the incumbent minister.
So where should we look first online?
A good starting point is to head over to the ARCHON page that is to be found in the website of The National Archives at www.nationalarchives.gov.uk and is a list of all sorts of archives in the country. The lists include diocesan archives, regimental and many other depositories that have a bearing on social history and genealogy.
From the National Achives home page navigate to the Records page and then to Catalogues and Online Records scroll down until you see the link for Archon. you will now be given a list of areas in Britain to search each with its own link so we see North East, North West etc. Selecting the area that you wish to look up will take you to an A-Z of repositories and if you were looking for a county record office this will be listed there.
Click on the relevant list and you will now be shown the information that ARCHON has on the archive in question giving you opening times etc and a very useful link to the actual archive’s website. I say useful because this is where you are likely to find the most up-to-date information about when they are open, if they have any late nights or Saturday opening times and how to get to them by road, rail, or air.
The actual repository’s website will give you such information as to what types of ID they accept, whether they are a member of the CARN ticket scheme where with one card you can gain access to many Record Offices across the country. Also the low down on whether you need to book a microfiche reader in advance of your arrival etc.
Some archive’s even include their catalogue online, this being a very useful tool as you can find out, in advance of your visit, if they hold the documents that you are looking for and also it allows you to take a note of the “call numbers” for the documents. This will cut down on wasting valuable research time, when you first arrive at the record office and indeed you may be able to order up, in advance, the documents to be waiting for you.
ARCHON is a most useful internet tool for those of us who are thinking about heading to an archive to do some research offline and is one of the ways to go about finding parish records.
There seems to be a trait among many family historians who all seem to want information to be available to them at the drop of a hat, for free and provided instantaneously as well.
Now, I’d like to raise an argument that this would seem to defeat the object of much family history research. Is it not the thrill of carrying out a piece of detective work, in order to find an ancestor after ploughing through the databases online and then visiting the County Record Offices in person to read page after page of parish registers on the microfilm machine, that makes this pastime of ours fun?
Certainly, a good few newcomers to family history seem to believe that all they will need to is log onto the web, enter a name into a search box and they will instantly find their ancestors going back to Adam and Eve. Many do not think that they should pay anything for this, as if the state has some sort of obligation to give them the information on demand.
I don’t know if you have you ever looked into the searches that are carried out on the likes of Google for keywords? Take “family tree” as an example. I’ve noticed that the number of people typing in a search on how to get their family tree for free, was quite high. It would seem that some people express the idea that as its “their family” that they have some sort of right to be given the research.
When most of the newbies, to family history, find that they need to pay for a subscription to a website, in order to progress, they either descend into rudeness, or give up before they even get properly started. This latter scenario being an absolute shame, in my view.
From my website I offer a tips and tricks email which gives the people, who have signed up to my list, valuable free content. At the bottom of the email I often have an advertisement for my paid for products and it amazes me that I get aggressive emails back saying things such as “I’m not made of money you know”. To these people I would just like to humbly suggest that they enjoy the 98% of the rest of the email, that comprises the free tip, and just try to ignore the advertisement for my products at the bottom. Do they have such a problem with commercial television, I wonder?
Expanding the discussion a little bit more, I’d like to bring in the arguments of the Open Genealogy Alliance – http://www.opengenalliance.org/
As I understand it, they are arguing that our public records should be made free to view online. They make the point that, in a large number of cases, many public records have now been licensed to private companies. These business need to make a return on their investment and so the public can only gain access to the data if they pay for it. The OGA are challenging this idea, saying that the digital versions of, what are, public records are effectively being privatised.
In my opinion there certainly needs to be some sort of balance, the record offices and archives are all facing up to the shortage of funds in the present economic climate and perhaps we should all make a bit of an effort to go out there, whenever possible, and visit the various archives more often. A vicious circle where they many have to cut their hours, due to less visitors coming to see them and reacting to spending cuts could see the record offices and archives closed or amalgamated.
Until absolutely every record is available online, a situation that is never likely to happen, then we family historians should stop expecting instant records to be available to us at our finger tips. And, what is more, I do think that we need to get out of depending only on our computer and just go out there into the world to find the information for ourselves. Believe me, it really is much more fun that way!
In our family tree research we can sometimes become a little blinkered. We find some important vital clue, such as a place of birth for our ancestor, and then assume that this will also be the location that our ancestor was baptised and grew up in.
In an ideal world, of course, the place of birth furnished by our ancestor, in the decennial census or some family document passed down to us, may also be the place in which they were christened in. Just consider for a moment, however, that your ancestor moved about the country. It may have only been a few miles, but even this could be enough to put you off track in finding them in the parish registers for the town in which they reported as their birth place.
Perhaps they were itinerant labourers following work. Consider those that sailed on small boats down the rivers, or those canal workers who moved before getting the child baptised.
Some children, like those in one branch of my family tree, were all baptised on the same day in the same church in a sort of “job lot”. Now what would happen, for any family historian looking for baptisms in the places of birth of the children, if the family had been on the move between child number one’s birth and child number five’s?
In the above example I am imagining that child 1 was born in Gloucester, other children in Bristol, while the last was born in Plymouth. I start my research, from a census record that says that my ancestor was born in Gloucester, but can’t find his/hers baptism or any other records in the Parishes in and around Gloucester as the child was baptised in Plymouth some years later where my seafaring ancestors finally put down roots.
So you can now see that if you have been furnished with a place of birth of your forebear from the census, or another document, that gives your ancestor’s place of birth as town A and you begin to search the Parish registers for this town for their baptism, then you have to consider that they may actually be in the registers somewhere else.
Also, to bear in mind is that the child’s mother may have gone back to her folks to give birth to her child before returning to her husband and her home and then having the child baptised there. What if they were not followers of the Church of England? This is something else to consider.
The tip I am pointing out here is that you must keep an open mind when doing family history otherwise a simple problem may become a brick wall.
If you are looking for something on finding ancestors before civil registration came in for England and Wales then what about my Audio CD on:
Wills can be of great use to any family historian for a number of reasons. They can furnish you with names of relatives, give you a description of the property that your ancestor owned at the time of their death and even reveal their favourite charity. Or though in my case I suspected that the charity that my aunt chose to leave the residue of her estate to was really her solicitor’s favoured charity and his suggestion!
Wills are one of the few documents written by your ancestor. For this reason they may give you an insight into their attitudes, social standing and their lifestyle. Perhaps, if you are lucky they can also explain family feuds and even expose scandals.
If, however, you discover that one of your ancestors seems to have been cut out of the will, you should always consider that this may not necessarily mean that they were disinherited. You should be open to considering that other arrangements had already been made for them in the lifetime of the deceased.
Quite a few family history researchers assume it is not worth checking if their ancestors left a will because they think their ancestor’s background precluded them from doing so. It is, however, wrong to believe that only a minority of people from the top of society left wills. Yes, it may be true that most people who left wills had some property of some kind or another. But wills can be found for people from amongst the very widest range of backgrounds.
Whilst it is perhaps true that only a small percentage of the population left a last will and testament, you should remember that for every person who did so means that there will be at least one other person mentioned in the document and this at least doubles your chance of finding a connection to your family tree, even if they are a distant relative.
It is possible, but not all that common, to find a will belonging to your family that pre-dates the parish registers, or even better where parish registers and the other primary sources have been destroyed or gone missing over the years.
You should know that before 1858 wills were generally proved in the church courts. In order to find a will in this time period will need you to have some understanding of the church hierarchy and how this bears relationship to the place or area that you are researching within.
So, what is a will?
It is a formal document stating exactly what a person desires should happen to their possessions after they have passed on. The person making a will is referred to as the Testator and they make a Last Will and Testament. This is actually a joint deed, the Will and the Testament.
Last Will and Testaments became the legal means of passing on one’s property in England in the year
1540. This was because it was only from that date that ‘Freehold’ land could be gifted or “devised” through a will. Before this date a “testament” was legally only concerned with what the law knows as “personality”. this is a term referring to personal property, that is a person’s moveable goods and chattels.
Why wasn’t it possible to pass on land? The answer lies with the fact that interests in “real property”, or the land and buildings your ancestors owned, would descend automatically to the deceased immediate heir. The church law, however, stated that at least one-third of a man’s property should pass directly to his widow as her dower and then one-third to all his children.
In theory these rules could not be broken, however property owners found ways that they could get around them. As an example, whilst “Copyhold land” – land held from the Lord of the manor – could not be left in a will before 1815, it could still be given up or “surrendered” to be used in a will. This effectively meant that it could be left to whomever a person wanted! Other methods of circumnavigating the rule was to transfer one’s property to trustees who would hold it during the owner’s lifetime as per that person’s instructions.
If you are lucky and find your ancestor has left a will you will see just how useful it is to the family historian.
I’ve been dipping back into Mark Herber’s book “Ancestral Trails” published by The History Press 2005, looking at the subject of researching back before Parish records started in the mid-16th century. He warns his readers to expect difficulties tracing their ancestors in that time. It seems that before then, you are only likely to come across sporadic references to your ancestors – or perhaps more properly people who could be your ancestors – in wills, tax records or court documents. Herber writes that “… you are unlikely to be able to trace a line of descent in this period (and in particular find documents that evidence that one man was related to another) unless you find your ancestors in property records.”
Now property records can be found for people from various classes, those who were substantial land owners and also yeoman, tenant farmers and labourers. This is why it is said that English manorial documents are perhaps one of the few types of records in which genealogical information about the common man, as opposed to those from the upper classes, is likely to survive from medieval times.
So what was the manorial system?
In the England of the Middle Ages, land was held from the English monarch by a lord and on his land the peasants worked and received his protection in return. Anglo-Saxon society was, as in most of the other European countries, rigidly hierarchical. Social status depended on birth and family relationships. Power was gained through the ownership of land, as this was the principal source of wealth at this time.
After the Norman conquest of England all the land of England was deemed to be owned by the monarch. The king would then grant use of it by means of a transaction known as “enfeoffment”, where land grants or “fiefs” were awarded to the earls, barons, bishops and others, in return for them providing him with some type of service.
There were two sorts of tenure, according to the type of service rendered by the tenant to the lord, free and unfree. Free tenure can then be broken down into different forms again. A tenure in chivalry, for example “tenure of knight service”, would be where the tenant was charged to provide his lord with a number of armed horsemen. Mark Heber in Ancestral Trails points out that this type of tenure was soon commuted to a money payment (or “scutage”). He also explains that among the types of “free tenure” was to be found “spiritual tenure” where divine services, or “frankelmoign” by which a clergyman, holding land from the lord of the manor, would pay his due in prayers said for the lord and his family.”Socage tenures” existed where the tenant provided his lord with agricultural services such as ploughing the lord’s retained land for 20 days a year.
“Villein tenure” or unfree tenure applied to those men known as villeins, serfs or bondmen. This class of tenant was not free to leave the manor without obtaining the permission of the lord. They would be subject to many obligations, some of which were onerous and these individuals held their land in exchange for providing the lord a number of days work in return. This could be, for example, four days work a week -Â but the nature of the work could vary depending on what was required.
Manorial Documents are fascinating for family historians, as are will documents that were not the exclusive preserve of the rich. I shall explore this area again in other posts.
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