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This week I provided TheGenealogist with a new article to go with their release of over a million Warwickshire Parish Records in association with the Warwickshire County Record Offices.
The article that I penned is a case history using the records on their website and I have to admit I learned quite a bit about the 18th century theatre – and had a laugh at some of the amusing details that I turned up about the subject’s birth place and her father’s profession.
The marriage was central to her career on the stage. Without marrying in Coventry’s Holy Trinity, she would most probably never have become a famous tragedienne! Had she not, then there would be no statue to her in Westminster Abbey, nor one on Paddington Green.
*Disclosure: Please note this post contains affiliate links. This does notmean 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:
Today the Royal Air Force celebrates their centenary.
To mark its birthday I was asked by TheGenealogist to write an article about one of the RAF’s key early chiefs. You can find it if you take a look at TheGenealogist’s website where they have launched some special RAF records to celebrate.
Disclosure: Please note this post contains affiliate links.
I was asked to put together an article on Buckinghamshire Tithe Maps this week as TheGenealogist has added more Colour Tithe Maps from The National Archives to their National Tithe Records collection. With this release researchers can see the plots owned or occupied by ancestors that lived in this ‘home county’ at the time of the survey in the 19th century on colour plans.
Colour Tithe map of Buckingham 1847
The new data includes:
Over 40,000 Plots of Land covering the years from 1837 to 1855 with some much later plans of altered apportionments
Joining the apportionment record books and the previously published grey-scale maps
These tagged colour maps and their fully searchable tithe schedule records are from those held at The National Archives. The collection gives the family history researcher the ability to search by name and keyword (for example parish or county) to look for all levels of society from large estate owners to occupiers of tiny plots such as a cottage or a cowshed.
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The following is a Press Release from TheGenealogist at the end of which you will find a link to an article that I wrote for them about a murderous lord of the manor whose burial can be found in these new records.
TheGenealogist has added over 366,000 individuals to their Parish Records for Warwickshire to increase the coverage of this county in the heart of England.
Released in association with Warwickshire County Record Office this brings high quality transcripts as well as images to family historians researching for ancestors in this area.
With 366,260 individuals included in this Warwickshire release, these new records will help family historians to find their ancestors’ baptisms, marriages and burials, in fully searchable records that cover various parishes from this part of England. With records that reach back to the mid 16th century, this release allows family historians to find the names of ancestors in baptisms, marriages and burials.
These new records are available as part of the Diamond Subscription at TheGenealogist, bringing the total to 934,495 searchable individuals for the county of Warwickshire.
Read the article that I wrote for them that reveals the last resting place of a murderous lord of the manor:
Disclosure: Please note this post contains affiliate links.
The latest release from TheGenealogist team this week:
TheGenealogist has added over 1.9 million individuals to its parish record collection covering the county of Sussex. Published In association with The Parish Record Transcription Society, this second release of records for the English county more than doubles the number of parish records available for the area.
Sussex scene from TheGenealogist Image Archive
TheGenealogist now has over 3 million individuals in the Sussex Parish Record Collection.
The new batch covers individual records of:
1,278,413 Baptisms
308,746 Marriages
327,091 Burials
The Parish Record Transcription Society (PRTSoc) have worked with TheGenealogist and S&N to make their records available online. With a combined 3 million plus individuals from baptism, marriage and burial records now fully searchable it is easier than ever to discover ancestors from Sussex by turning to TheGenealogist’s parish records collection.
These records are published as a result of a major project undertaken by PRTSoc staff and dedicated volunteers to transcribe the parish registers of West Sussex with the aim of preserving them for generations to come. By working with TheGenealogist these are now also searchable by online researchers on TheGenealogist.
This release joins TheGenealogist’s Sussex collection including parish records to form a major resource for the county.
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The latest release from TheGenealogist team this week:
Queen Mary 1936 from TheGenealogist’s Image Archive
TheGenealogist has just released over 2.7 million BT27 records for the 1930s. These Outbound Passenger Lists are part of an expanding immigration and emigration record set on TheGenealogist that feature the historical records of passengers who sailed out of United Kingdom ports in the years between 1930 and 1939. With the release of this decade of records, the already strong Immigration,Emigration, Naturalisation and passenger list resources on TheGenealogist have been expanded again.
The fully searchable BT27 records from The National Archives released today will allow researchers to:
Discoverpotential family members travelling together using TheGenealogist’s SmartSearch. This unique system is able to recognise family members together on the same voyage. In this situation it will display a family icon which allows you to view the entire family with one click.
Find people travelling to America, Canada, India, New Zealand, Australia and elsewhere in the Passenger lists of people departing by sea from the United Kingdom.
View images of the original passenger list documents that had been kept by the Board of Trade’s Commercial and Statistical Department and its successors.
Discover the ages, last address and where the passenger intended to make their permanent residence.
These fully indexed records allow family historians to search by name, year, country of departure, country of arrival, port of embarkation and port of destination.
Those with ancestors who sailed from Britain in the 1930’s will welcome this fascinating new release from TheGenealogist, which adds to their current Emigration records, now totalling over 19 million and dating back to 1896.
This week the initial tranche has been released, as you can see from the press anouncement that follows.
TheGenealogist has released the first part of an exciting new record set, The Lloyd George Domesday Survey – a major new release that will find where an ancestor lived in 1910. This unique combination of maps and residential data, held by The National Archives and being digitised by TheGenealogist, can precisely locate your ancestor’s house on large scale (5 feet to the mile) hand annotated maps that plots the exact property.
Geo Bone a Coroner’s Officer lived at 12 Kennett Road in 1910. The area has now been redeveloped and the road name reused further north in a new realigned thoroughfare.
Researchers often can’t find where ancestors lived as road names changed over time, the Blitz saw areas bombed to destruction, developers changed sites out of all resemblance from what had stood there before and lanes and roads were extinguished to build estates and office blocks. All this means that searching for where an ancestor lived using a website linked to modern maps can be frustrating when they fail to pinpoint where the old properties had once been.
TheGenealogist’s new release will link individual properties to extremely detailed ordnance survey maps used in 1910
Locate an address found in a census or street directory down to a specific house
Fully searchable by name, county, parish and street.
The maps will zoom down to show the individual properties as they existed in 1910
Complementing the maps on TheGenealogist are the accompanying books that will also provide researchers with basic information relative to the valuation of each property, including the valuation assessment number, map reference, owner, occupier, situation, description and extent.
This mammoth project begins with the first release of the IR91 Index with subsequent releases of the more detailed IR58 Field Books planned. There are over 94,500 Field Books, each having hundreds of pages to digitise with associated large scale IR121 annotated OS maps.
The initial release from TheGenealogist is for the City of London and Paddington maps with their index records. Future releases will expand out across the country with cross linked maps wherever they are available.
Mark Bayley, Head of Development at TheGenealogist says:
“With our English & Welsh Tithe Map collection, we’ve become known for our map based records and this new collection makes a fantastic later addition. The maps show an incredible amount of detail, allowing you to zoom right in on the hand annotated property. The records that go with these maps are just as detailed, allowing you to find out all manner of information about your ancestral home.”
The National Archives issued the following statement:
“The Lloyd George ‘Domesday Records’ form essentially a census of property for Edwardian England and Wales. The innovative linking of individually searchable property data with associated annotated Ordnance Survey maps will be of huge value to family and local historians alike.”
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TheGenealogist has extended its UK Parish Records collection with a new and exclusive release of 650,000 parish records for Nottinghamshire. These records can be used to find your ancestors’ baptisms, marriages and burials in these fully searchable records that cover parishes from this important East Midland county of England. With records that reach back to1633, this release includes the records of 56 parishes, including:
369,100 individuals in Baptisms, 168,000 individuals in Marriages and 112,800 individuals in Burials
You can use these transcripts to find the names of ancestors, parents’ forenames (in the case of baptisms), father’s occupation (where noted), abode or parish, parish that the event took place in, the date of the event, and in the case of marriage records the bride’s maiden name and the witnesses’ names.
Lord Byron
Amongst the notable Nottinghamshire people that can be found in these records are the infamous Lord Byron and his brilliant mathematician daughter Ada, Countess of Lovelace. Both are buried in the parish of Hucknal Torkard. As well as nobility, in this collection we also come across the baptism of Amos Hind. He was famous for playing First Class Cricket for the neighbouring county of Derbyshire between 1876 and 1877. Amos died aged 82 in 1931.
These additions brings their Nottinghamshire parish record collection to over 919,800 records.To search these records and many more see TheGenealogist.co.uk
Disclosure: Please note this post contains affiliate links.
This piece of news was released by the team at TheGenealogist.
The data subscription site has just launched a new collection of Police Letter Books for Hampshire. This is an intriguing mixture of promotions, retirements, movements, and other observations about Police officers in this county from 1891 to 1911. In amongst its pages you will be able to trace the career of your Hampshire police ancestors as they rise or fall.
These records reveal names and collar numbers of officers promoted, reduced in rank or dismissed from the force for committing various acts of misconduct. The misdemeanors often seem to involve alcohol, ranging from accepting a glass of beer to being drunk on duty. For those more competent officers who were commended for their actions in the pages of these documents, you can read the actions that had been seen as deserving of inclusion in the Letter Books.
In addition, TheGenealogist has released the Colour Tithe Maps for Northumberland. These maps join the previously released greyscale maps for the majority of the country that are already published on TheGenealogist.
Contains over 600 colour maps, linking to over 62,000 tithe records for this county
These maps are a fantastic resource that enable you to see where your ancestors owned or occupied land in Northumberland
The only online National collection of tithe records and maps
Bilton Tithe Map from Northumberland
Tithe map of All Saints, Newcastle Upon Tyne, Northumberland on TheGenealogist
The searchable schedules, or apportionment books, contain detailed information on land use and these are linked to the maps on TheGenealogist. Clicking through from the transcript to a map will jump straight to the plot for an individual and can reveal buildings, fields, houses, rivers, lakes, woods and also cover villages, towns and cities.
A case study using one of the new record sets
The Ups and Down of a life on the beat
The latest release of Police Letter Books for Hampshire is an eclectic mix of details of promotions and removals of officers (postings from one place to another), as well as recording such things as additional pay and a number of disciplinary matters that were handed out to the policemen of the Hampshire County Constabulary.
If we search for one late Victorian police officer in the records, named John William Walsh, we can see that P.C. 82 J W Walsh had set out on his employment in the force around 1893. On the 12th June of that year, our 3rd class Police Constable appears first in the Letter Books when he was being sent from headquarters to serve at Kingsclere Police station. As this officer appears no less than nineteen times in the records between 1893 and 1911, we can see that he was a career policeman having probably set his sights on progressing through the ranks. By the end of that same year, on the 8th November 1893, he had been transferred to Totton and promoted to 2nd Class Constable.
So far so good for John Walsh. In 1898 he had made 1st Class Constable and then the job took him to Brockenhurst.
January 1900 sees a blip in his job prospects when he failed his Sergeant’s exam, which is duly recorded in the records – but he bounces back a few months later. By the 18th June 1900, when he gets his coveted promotion to Sergeant and is ‘removed’ to Petersfield the same day, we now see that he has been allocated collar number 14. He crops up in the Police Letter Books in a note of an entitlement to extra pay for 13 days in 1905 and then in 1906 saw him reach the pinnacle of his career as he is promoted to Inspector!
What could possibly go wrong?
These new records on TheGenealogist show that, conversely, 1906 was also the worst year for John Walsh’s path up the ranks of the Hampshire County Constabulary. Promoted to Inspector in January 1906; in October he was on the way back down!
The Police Letter book for the 18th October 1906 sadly reveals that our Inspector, of nine months, was to be reduced in ranks to that of a 1st Class Constable. This must have been devastating for him and his family as he was not just going down one rank, to Sergeant, but back to where he had been eight years before. His offence: being drunk while on duty in Holdenhurst Road, Bournemouth.
A lesser man may have considered his position in the police, but not John Walsh. From the records we find the newly numbered P.C.165 removed from Bournemouth to Farringdon on the same day that he had been busted down in rank. A year later, in 1907, and he has been promoted to Sergeant for the second time in his police career. He is posted to Basingstoke with this rank with yet another change in collar number to 35. It was on the 22nd November 1911 that we see he had climbed further still. It was not quite to the rank that he had lost in 1906, but J Walsh was now a Sergeant Major in the force and was removed to Winchester.
Using these new records on TheGenealogist has enabled us to follow the ups and downs of one particular police officer who, like many of his colleagues, came a cropper through partiality to a drink. If you have Policeman ancestors from Hampshire then search this collection to find interesting mentions of them as they are removed to new stations across the county, are commended for catching thieves, receive promotions, or are sometimes disciplined for their actions.
Disclosure: Please note this post contains affiliate links.
TheGenealogist has made millions of new Hampshire Parish Records available on its site.
Released in partnership with the Hampshire Genealogical Society there are over 2.1 million new fully searchable records of individuals released online for the first time
With these records those searching for ancestors from Hampshire can discover almost 1.8 million people recorded within the baptisms from this area in the south of England as far back as 1538 up to 1751
Family researchers can also discover the details of over 212,000 individuals from marriages between 1538 and 1753 and nearly 143,800 people listed in the burials of Hampshire from 1838 to 1865
Hampshire Genealogical Society worked with TheGenealogist to publish their records online, making 2,135,878 individuals from baptism, marriage and burial records fully searchable. Dolina Clarke, Chairman of Hampshire Genealogical Society said:
“The Hampshire Genealogical Society have decided to put the remaining data from their parish register indexes for Hampshire, which are not already on line, with FHS-Online and TheGenealogist (S & N). We looked at various different online sites and felt that S & N were able to offer us a very fair deal. Furthermore they are a British company with whom we have had a very good relationship for over 20 years.”
Mark Bayley, Head of Online Development at TheGenealogist, welcomed Hampshire Genealogical Society to the growing number family history societies on both TheGenealogist and FHS-Online saying: “We’re delighted that HGS chose to publish their records through TheGenealogist and FHS-Online. This release adds to the ever expanding collection of parish records on both websites. These partnerships help societies boost their funds whilst bringing their records to a much wider audience, through online publication.”
This release joins TheGenealogist’s already published Hampshire parish records, sourced from the Phillimore Registers, and soon we will also be adding further transcriptions that will fill in any gaps to provide an even more comprehensive coverage of this important county.
If your society is interested in publishing records online, please contact Mark Bayley on 01722 717002 or see fhs-online.co.uk/about.php
Example: The last Briton to die in a duel on English soil.
James Alexander Seton was the last British person to be killed in a duel on English soil and he is buried in his family’s vault at St Mary’s Fordingbridge, Hampshire.
St Mary’s, Fordingbridge, Hampshire from the Image Archive on TheGenealogist.
During the early 1840s James Seton, and his wife Susannah, rented some rooms in Southsea on the outskirts of Portsmouth, Hampshire. Seton was a man of means, inheriting wealth, and so had no need to work. The son of a Colonel, he had spent a brief spell in the Army as a junior cavalry officer though his short career never found him being promoted any higher than the rank of cornet. The Setons were of Scottish ancestry, their forebears being descended from the Earls of Dunfermline and Seton’s grandfather was Vice-Admiral James Seton, governor of St Vincent in the Caribbean.
In May 1845 James Seton met Isabella Hawkey, whom he set about pursuing even though he was a married man. She was the wife of Lieutenant Henry Hawkey, an officer in the Royal Marines. When the coast was clear, and her husband was away, Seton began paying visits to Isabella at her lodgings bearing gifts. Lt. Hawkey began to hear the rumours of this and forbade his wife from seeing Seton again. On 19 May 1845, however, there was a ball held in the King’s Rooms, Southsea, which the Hawkeys as well as James Seton attended. When Isabella danced with Seton this caused a quarrel in which Lt. Hawkey called Seton a “blaggard and a scoundrel”. Having been insulted by this, Seton decided to challenge the Royal Marine Officer to a duel. The next evening, on the beach at Browndown near Gosport and after the seconds had measured out fifteen paces, the duelists took their pistols and fired. James Seton’s shot missed his opponent; Henry Hawkey’s pistol was half-cocked and failed to fire. Under the rules of dueling, that could have been an honourable end to it but Lieutenant Hawkey insisted on a second exchange of shots and this time Seton fell when he was struck by a bullet entering his lower abdomen.
Suffering from his wounds, the wounded man was taken by boat to Portsmouth where he was operated on by the eminent London surgeon Robert Liston. The surgery at first appeared to go well, but then infection set in and Seton quickly went downhill. He died of his injuries on 2nd June 1845 and was buried eight days later. His funeral procession through the town saw most of the shops closing in respect and he was laid to rest in a tomb outside the east front of the church next to his father. A search finds his burial on the 10th June 1845 in the Hampshire records on TheGenealogist.
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