Tag: online resources

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Black Sheep in the Family Tree

 

Hangman's noose
Hangman’s noose

Finding a criminal in our past family can embarrass some of us, while others are simply tickled pink to think they are descended from a rogue or two. This is especially true when the criminal ancestors are a few generations back and so not too frighteningly near.

One of the problems, for the family historian, is that any black sheep in our family were probably not too keen on giving their true name when apprehended. So when searching for them on census night they may be frustratingly missing, unless they are locked up by courtesy of His or Her Majesty in one of the crown’s prisons.

Census records for Wormwood Scrubs, Parkhurst, Pentonville, Strangeways and Dartmoor are available in the normal census collections at Ancestry,   Findmypast   and  TheGenealogist.

You may also come across the census records for the county gaol, such as the one in Exeter for the County of Devon.

I was looking this week at some of the online resources for criminal records such as the England and Wales Criminal Registers 1791-1892 at Ancestry.co.uk. These register books include a brief bit of information from the Quarter Session Trials.

I didn’t manage to identify an ancestor but I got drawn into wondering about the story of a person with my surname from my ancestor’s county who in 1834 at the age of 43 was sentenced to be transported for 7 years for larceny.

 

And then there was one Janus Majaval, aged 22 and sentenced to death along with several others at the Devon County Assizes on the 19th July 1845. All the condemned men carried Iberian sounding names and their crime was Murder on the High Seas.

 

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A Family Tree Brick Wall

I have spent some time this weekend with one of my Family tree’s brick wall. An ancestor who is important for me to get further back in my paternal line.

John Thorn turns up in the Devon city of Plymouth and marries Sarah Branton, a local girl, in the year 1794 and whisks her off to Dartmouth. Very soon after their son, also called John, is born and baptised in Dartmouth’s St Saviour Parish. From this I made the assumption that perhaps the elder John was from Dartmouth. In the Parish records for Plymouth, Charles the Martyr, he gives away only that he was a mariner, but not of which parish he was from.

So I start to use the online resources available to me to try and find John Thorn in the parish records for the churches in Dartmouth; but with a common Devon name I can’t absolutely identify the baptisms or deaths that look likely candidates for this forebear of mine.

I then used the Hugh Wallis site to look inside batches of parish records from the IGI on the familyseach site. This really useful tool is back up and working, having been disabled when the LDS revamped their website in 2011. Now I was able to specify which batch to look at for the Parish of St Saviour Dartmouth and so I discovered some of the christenings of the other children born to John and Sarah and even that one of these children went on to have a child in 1816 which takes the mother’s surname with all that that implies!

The other use that I put the Hugh Wallis gateway to the IGI to was to see if I could find the marriages of the Thorn girls in the parish by selecting a batch number, as provided by Hugh Wallis’ site and then entering their surname into the Spouse box. Regretfully I have not found any, which seems to indicate they may well have moved on from the town to live elsewhere. While my 3 x great grandfather stayed and was buried in the town, I am still looking for what happened to his parents and siblings.

Not withstanding this result for me this time, the use of Hugh Wallis’ site, in the way I described, may well help others to break down a brick wall or two. So if you haven’t tried it before, I do commend it to you.

Hugh Wallis online

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What is the future for finding the past online?

I’ve been reading a business tip today. It was all about what big company may wish to gobble up the likes of Ancestry.com in the future.

It began from the premise that family history was big business, with the more of us turning to online resources such as the subscription sites run by Ancestry who have grown their revenue every quarter since they went public on the New York Stock Exchange.

I have always thought of Ancestry as being one of the big players in the genealogical market. But this article, by The Mottley Fool, talks about the possible threat of a larger company than them entering the market. The likes of Facebook, Google, or Microsoft being their assumed predators.

All three of these organisations could take advantage of the massive amounts of information that they have acquired, plus the technological skills of the programmers that they employ to build a more streamlined search website than what is already on offer in the market.

As The Motley Fool points out Facebook has its Timeline feature, which is an indication that they have noticed the potential of our hobby. There is Google, a big player in organising information, to consider as well. Meanwhile, Microsoft have something called Project Greenwich which allows its users to collect together their photos, links, scanned objects, and potentially more information to create chronological timelines about specific events, people, places, or things. It would not take much for them to turn this into an interactive timeline of our family history.

It is suggested that by providing such a timeline that this would encourage people to remain as members of sites like Ancestry for longer and thus defend them against the problem of membership churn. The article  concludes that perhaps these firms will go down the partnership route, or that Microsoft licenses its technology to the likes of Ancestry.

But who knows what will be on offer to us in the future in researching the past online?

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