Tag: National Burial Index

Posted on

Missing Burials in your Family History Research?

 

Bunhill Fields Burial groundHave you searched for an ancestor’s burial and been frustrated by not finding them anywhere?

I know that I have!

For a very long time I couldn’t find the burial of my 2x great-grandfather and great-grandmother who had originated in Edinburgh and Fife respectively. They had, however, died in the English spa town of Cheltenham in the 1850s.

I had been shown a plaque, on the wall inside an Anglican church, that commemorated them; but Christ Church itself did not have a graveyard with any headstones. I discovered later that it was, in their time, a chapelry to the main St Mary’s Church – though later it would become a parish of its own.

Some years ago I checked with the local Family History Society, to see if they knew where my ancestors had been buried. I got a polite email back saying that they couldn’t find them in the records that they had available. I had gone down this route, as very often FHSs run small projects to transcribe records that don’t make it online with the main data websites on account of their limited audience.

Having drawn an initial blank in Cheltenham, and as my ancestors were Scots, I began looking in Edinburgh and Fife where many of their family were to be found in the various burial grounds there. It is often worth seeing if a lost ancestor has returned “home” after their death. Even if they haven’t done, there is always the possibility that they will be mentioned on a headstone of a family grave. I have found this especially happened when a spouse, or child, died abroad, though it can be simply in another part of the country that they are interned. In my experience, of looking at memorials in graveyards, I have seen a fair number of people that died and are laid to rest in India or other parts of the Empire, during the time these lands were under British rule, and then recorded on loved one’s memorials at home.

Returning to my brick wall in Cheltenham and still having not found my lost ancestor burials elsewhere, I thought about my options.

The Phillimore Atlas & Index of Parish Registers

– First was to check the parishes in a radius around the area. For this I used The Phillimore Atlas and Index of Parish Registers Atlas (you can get a print copy of this book from S&N Genealogy Supplies)

– I could also use the handy maps tool on familysearch.org (maps.familysearch.org) to find contiguous parishes

– I would make a search of the National Burial Index

– On my next visit to the Society of Genealogists, in London, I could see what they had in their library

Society of Genealogists

– If I travelled to the county I could go to the Gloucestershire Archives (the county record office for Gloucestershire) and search their collections to see if if I could find any other records that may help, though in the intervening years some have been made available on ancestry to search online.

Gloucestershire Archives
Gloucestershire Archives housed in a former school off Alvin Street. © Copyright Philip Halling and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

In the end it was this last option of the Gloucestershire Archives records that solved the problem of where my ancestors had been buried. In the Bishop’s Transcripts I found that my great-great-grandfather was buried in Cheltenham’s New Burial Ground in August 1858, as was his wife in May 1851. Bishop’s Transcripts (BTs), a copy of the entries in the parish register and sent annually to the diocese by the parish, can be a really helpful set of records to use. This is especially when the original parish record has been damaged, lost, stolen or simply isn’t clear to read.

From a document that I also found at the Gloucestershire Archives, I discovered that there were 4 main burial grounds in Cheltenham.

– The first was the churchyard attached to St Mary’s Church

– The second was a burial ground opened nearby on High Street in 1831, although the churchyard continued to be used. This new burial ground had a small chapel – St Mary’s cemetery chapel, that later became St Mary’s Mission

– There was also a small burial ground for Holy Trinity church. A few non-conformist churches also had burial grounds, e.g. St Andrews Congregationalist Church

– In 1864 the Civil Cemetery was opened at Bouncers Lane and both previous burial grounds were closed to new burials. Burials still took place in pre-purchased or used graves, i.e. a family grave

It is probably in the second burial ground that my ancestors were laid to rest. Unfortunately the area is now known as the Winston Churchill Memorial Garden and the headstones have been removed. I find this sad as I shall never be able to find their actual graves, but at least my brick wall has fallen and I know where they are buried.

 

—–

Hit a brick wall with your English/Welsh ancestors?

Learn how to discover where to find the many records and resources that will help you to find your forebears.

Join the Family History Researcher Course online.

Send to Kindle
Posted on

Tracing Ancestors With a Common Surname

Online-Old-Parish-RecordsThe problem of tracing an ancestor, with a common surname, is one of those brick walls that many of us come up against in our family tree research. When it occurs after the introduction of state run vital indexes, in 1837 for England & Wales and eighteen years later, in 1855, when Scotland adopted the idea, it can be difficult to find the exact person that is our forebear, but at least we have a central index to search. The Crown Dependencies followed suit at different times again, so you will see civil registration introduced into Guernsey in 1840, Jersey in 1842, Alderney in 1850 and Sark in 1915. The Isle of Man beginning compulsory civil registration of births and deaths in 1878 and then marriages in 1884.

But what about searching for a Smith or Jones in the years pre-civil indexes? If you are expecting an easy answer I’m afraid I am going to disappoint, as common surnames do present us family historians with great difficulties to overcome. Having said that, however, all may not be lost.

If the ancestor in question has an unusual first, or middle name, then this may help you enormously to single your likely candidate out from the others. In my own research it was not the actual man I was trying to track down who had the unusual middle name, but his son. I had already made the connection to John Branton Thorn via the prime sources and knew him to be my ancestor. I was now on the trail of five or six John and Sarahs who were candidates for his parents, according to his baptismal details. So which of the various John Thorns who married a woman whose first name was Sarah in various parts of Devon jumped out as a strong possibility? It was the one where the bride’s surname was Branton.

The advice I have been given is to try to tie the person with the common name to one with a less than common one. It could be their wife, a brother or sister and so on and perhaps it is an unusual first name, middle name, or maiden name you can use.

If you are not able to find your ancestor for certain in the church registers, then always remember that the Bishop’s Transcripts may possibly harbour more information than the register did. It is not a certainty that it will, but it is worth a look.

Try using Wills and Admons to see if you can find the possible parents (or a brother, sister or other relation) naming your ancestor as a beneficiary.

Another point to be aware of is that even with a less common surname there can be many problems to overcome in family history research. As spelling of surnames varied so much, until the mid 19th century or later when they became more fixed, and with many of our ancestors not being literate, the clergy often recorded the name as they thought they heard it and so a regional accent is probably responsible for one line of my ancestors being recorded as Sysal, Sissell, Sissill and Sizzall in the church records from 1780 to 1798.

If the person you are researching was born in the years just before civil registration began, but was likely to have died after the death registers began, how about looking for them in these records. You can also use the church burial records, if you know the parish they died in. What about trying the National Burial Index? If you just have a first name and a common surname I grant you that this is not going to be much help to you but if you know the place that they lived then you may be able to narrow down you likely forebears.

On the subject of places, some names can be very common in one area, for example Thorn/Thorne in Devon, but a common name may not be so common in another place.

Advice that I have seen given on other blogs and forums say that you should:

  • Learn as much identifying information as you can about the ancestor you are researching.

So look for family bibles, they can list the names of children. Think about whether there are any other records for the district where your ancestor lived that they may have been recorded within? Taxes, land records, muster rolls, etc.

  • Make a chronology of the ancestor’s life if you can; where did they live for the various events in their lives? Can you identify the street, the town or hamlet for the significant moments in their time-line? If you can then you have a framework to work with.

Common surnames are certainly a problem for family history researchers trying to populate their family tree and sometimes there will be no easy answer. Persevere, however, as more and more records become available there is always a chance that your ancestor may be within one of them.

Send to Kindle
Posted on

I Couldn’t Find My Ancestor On One Site..

Family Tree on a computer

Using Different ancestor look-up sites give you more but beware of taking everything at face value!

I’ve touched on this subject in a previous post, but I thought I’d tell you about another time I found why it is so important to make use of more than one website when doing family tree research.

I couldn’t find a death record for one of my forebears on the freeBMD.org site or on Ancestry.co.uk and so I opened up findmypast.co.uk and typed in my man’s name into the search box.

I got a hit for him in the National Burial Index database that findmypast hosts on-line. Now this is not the recently launched 3rd revised edition that can be bought on CD from S & N Genealogical supplies, but is a previous edition that has not got as many names. I was lucky, however, that the ancestor I was tracing was there for the finding.

On the subject of revisiting past topics in my writings, there was the problem of transcribers getting an ancestor’s name wrong because they couldn’t read the handwriting. In this case my individual had an easy first name as well as a last, but his middle names were Scottish surnames used as middle names “Wemyss” and “Frewen”. On the findmypast website his first and surname were listed correctly, but one of his middle names had been mangled by the transcribers to Wernys. What I am advocating is to remember to include variants if at first your search provides nothing of value.

On the subject of using different websites I have also had some new leads come my way this week through my habit of publishing my family tree onto various platforms including Ancestry.co.uk and GenesReunited not to mention my own private family history website. Every now and again I will find a shared ancestor appears in someone else’s tree. This week I found a great-grandmother of mine appear as a sibling of another person’s direct ancestor. Now this maternal line I have yet to work on properly my self and so it was with some excitement that I found the research seemed to have been done for me.

But here is another warning revisited! When I looked at the contributors tree for the parents of my great-grandmother, my potential 2 x great-grandparents, I found that the owner of the family tree had include no less than three sets of mothers and fathers for the children, all of which had the same common first name for the father, but with different mother’s names! I imagine that it is a work in progress and they are yet to eliminate the incorrect couples, but if I had simply merged them into my own family tree then I would have imported these errors. What I intend to do, and urge you to follow as good practice, is to use these leads.

Send to Kindle