A press release has reached me from my friends over at TheGenealogist and S&N. They are proud to be sponsoring the “Echoes of the Past” show that will be helping promote family history in Lincolnshire.
‘Echoes of the Past’ promises to be the first major family history show for the county. S&N will be providing specialist help, talks and advice on the day, both companies will have products and special offers available to visitors.
Echoes of the Past is a brand new event that will be at the Epic Centre, Lincolnshire Showground, Lincoln on Sunday 27th October 2013 from 10am to 4pm.
The event is aimed at helping people learn more about family history research in Lincolnshire, what resources are available and hints and tips to help researchers along the way. It will be a great way to experience memories of Lincolnshire, with particular focus on aviation, agriculture and engineering- three main industries that featured in many people’s lives.
‘Echoes of the Past’ will also feature the Lincolnshire Family History Society, Lincolnshire Archives, professional Genealogists and the Lincolnshire Aviation Centre.
Nigel Bayley, Managing Director of TheGenealogist and S&N Genealogy comments: “We are delighted to join forces with ‘Echoes of the Past’ in their new venture in Lincolnshire. It promises to be a great event for anyone interested in family history in the Lincolnshire area and we look forward to helping the organisers establish this as the premier genealogy event for the Lincolnshire areaâ€.
I see that TheGenealogist.co.uk has released a whole batch of records that are great for finding any ancestors of yours who may have fallen foul of the law!
Its a set of 90,000 Criminal records, which cover indictable offences in England and Wales between 1782 and 1892, that they have added to their website for Diamond members and these records also uniquely cover prisoners ‘pardoned’, criminal charges and those classed as ‘criminal lunatics’.
Coming from The National Archives the records cover the following:
HO27 – Criminal Registers, England and Wales
Registers of all persons in England and Wales charged with indictable offences showing the results of the trials, the sentences in case of conviction, and dates of execution of persons sentence to death.
HO13 – Criminal Entry Books
Lists of pardons.
HO20/13 – Prisons Correspondence and Papers
Including Bethlehem Hospital criminal lunatics and other asylums.
CRIM1 – Central Criminal Court Depositions
Statements on oath used in evidence in trials at the Old Bailey and pardons if granted.
As TheGenealogist says in its newsletter this month, “the 1800s in England and Wales was a place where it was not difficult to get into trouble and end up facing a severe punishment, perhaps even the death penalty. These new records may help shed light on a family relative who broke the Law and paid the consequences.”
Some of us love to unearth the odd black-sheep in the family. So take a look here and join their Diamond level membership to take advantage of this data:
Disclosure: The links above are compensated affiliate links and may result in me being compensated by TheGenealogist.co.uk should you buy their products.
I’d like to welcome any new members of my online course The Family History Researcher Academy that may be reading this blog for the first time today. I aim to post articles and advice here that will help those of you researching your British Isles ancestors. Sometimes the post will be about my own experience of using an online data set, an offline resource at a record office or some other archive, and sometimes it is to draw your attention to a new resource that has been launched by one of the main genealogy look-up sites.
Today I’d like to feature a new resource for those with sea going ancestors published by my friends over at TheGenealogist. It gives details of over 439,000 Royal Navy and Merchant Seamen records which are searchable by name, rank, age and ship. The full crew list can be displayed for any of the ships.
Covering the years 1851-1911, these include lists and agreements for those involved in merchant shipping and ship crews for those at home ports, sea and abroad.
Details given may include age, place of birth, rank and ticket number, previous and current ships with ports of registration, dates, place and reason for joining and leaving.
The records are from a variety of sources which include BT98 and specialist county and non-county census records. Read more here.
Disclosure: The above link is a compensated affiliate link. Should you click on it and buy a subscription from TheGenealogist then I may be compensated for sending you over to them.
I’ve just been on a visit to the City of London and while on my way to a meeting I realised I was passing the famous nonconformist burial ground of Bunhill Fields!
It was back in 1665 that the City of London Corporation hit on the idea of making use of some of the fen in this area as a common burial ground for the interment of bodies of the City’s inhabitants who had died of the plague and could not be accommodated in the churchyards.
The burial ground then went on to attract those people who were mainly Protestant but who dissented from the Established Church. The reason for this was the predominance of such citizens in the City of London over others who did not conform to the Church of England’s ways, such as the Catholics or Jews. Not withstanding this, Bunhills burial ground was open for interment to anyone who could afford to pay the fees.
The end of this burial ground was to come after the 1852 Burial Act was passed. This piece of legislation enabled places such as Bunhill Fields to be closed, once they had become full. For Bunhills, its Order for closure was made in December 1853. The records show that the final burial was for Elizabeth Howell Oliver and this took place on January 5 1854. By that date approximately 120,000 interments had taken place.
Nearby can be found the Quaker Burial ground, known as Quaker Gardens. These are on the other side of Bunhill Row to the main nonconformist grounds and contains the burial plot of George Fox, who founded the Quakers.
In many other parts of the country nonconformists would simply have made use of the Parish church yard until public cemeteries became the norm for internment. True that there are a few nonconformist burial grounds in other parts of the country but many were miles away from where the deceased lived and so it was more practical to be buried in the church yard along with their Church of England neighbours.
For those of you researching Parish Records and Non-Conformist Records my advice is to go and look at what TheGenealogist has to offer:
Disclosure: The Links in the above are Compensated Affiliate links. If you click on them then I may be rewarded by The Genealogist.co.uk should you sign up for their subscriptions.
When conducting family tree research, obviously the more information you have, the better; that’s why millions of family history search terms are typed into google every single day. In fact, it has never been easier to find all kinds of ancestry data online including birth, marriage and death records, maps, old photographs, news archives, military records and much more.
By starting with what you know about your immediate ancestors, those at the beginning of their search can start using googling their family tree right away. Here are some tips that will help you get the most out of google when it comes to investigating your ancestry online.
Google Search Tips
When googling your family history, there are a few things to remember in order for you to narrow down the results to those most relevant to you. These include:
1. Always put the most important information at the start of your search term as this will help order the results into those that are most relevant.
2. Use quotation marks on proper names and exact match phrases. For example, searching “Louis Matherson†will come up with page results that show that exact combination. If you type in Louis Matherson without quotation marks, then you may get results for Joe Matherson or Louis Simon.
3. Exclude unwanted results using a minus sign. For example, if you know that there are two towns in the country called ‘Gillingham’ then you could type in “Gillingham –Kent†in order to tell google that you meant the other Gillingham in Dorset. However, adding a minus sign can in some instances also minus pages that refer to both Gillingham in Dorset and Gillingham in Kent, so make sure you careful about what you eliminate.
4. Google’s search algorithms do take into account synonyms, but you can search for additional synonyms by typing the tilde symbol (~) before certain words such as ‘~graveyard’ which will display results for ‘cemetery’,’ churchyard’, and ‘memorial’.
5. If you have found a page with a long list of names and you want to find the relevant information quickly, you can type ctrl + alt and ‘f’ and it will bring up a search box in the corner of that page. Simply type in the name you are looking for and the webpage will highlight the matching text within the document instantly.
6. If you want to search a surname, but you’re not sure on the correct spelling then you can use the wildcard symbol (*) which will tell google to accept any consecutive string of characters that appears after the asterisk symbol.
7. If your search takes you to a ‘file not found’ error message, this could mean that the page you are looking for is no longer updated (amongst other reasons). But never fear, you can still search for that information by looking for search results that have the word ‘cached’ at the end of the description and URL.
Finding Free Genealogy Resources Online
Historical documents are being digitized and added to the internet regularly, so it is always wise to do a quick scan of the latest genealogy news websites. That way you can see if anything has been added that might prove useful to your own investigation.
You may also want to seek out genealogy forums and message boards to see if a distant family member has previously conducted family history research that may be of some relevance to you. However, be wary of using other people’s research in your studies because they may have got some of their information wrong. Always double check anything you do decide to include.
Many popular genealogy subscription sites such as ancestry.com allow users a free-trial of their resources, so it may be a good idea to sign up and see what you can find even if you can’t afford the subscription fee.
Offline Sources
Historical records will make up the bulk of your investigation, however, you may also want to include interviews with relatives (some maybe more distant than others) in order to add ‘colour’ to your report. Use social media and people finding services to track these family members down and send them a draft copy. You never know, it might prompt them to start an investigation of their own and you may be able to share your efforts.
So there you have some tips that will help you search effectively online when conducting family tree research. If you have any other relevant tips, please leave a comment below.
Elise Leveque is a freelance translator and blogger from Bristol. She is currently in the throes of putting her own family tree together.
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Disclosure: The Links in the above are Compensated Affiliate links. If you click on them then I may be rewarded by Findmypast.co.uk or The Genealogist.co.uk should you sign up for their subscriptions.
Many of us will find that we have a male ancestor who has served in the British Army at some point during their lives. A smaller percentage of our women forebears will also have served the country but before 1949 women are found primarily as nurses, or in the auxiliary corps, and not in the Army as they could be today.
I recently set out to look for one of my ancestors and where I began searching for him depended on whether he had been an officer or a regular soldier as the records of ‘Officers’ are generally quite separate from the sources for those soldiers of the ‘Other Ranks’.
A second consideration, to take into account, was his dates of service.
In a lesson that I am including in my Family History Researcher course I will be covering some of the key resources that a person may want to use in their research. Some of these records are available online, while for others you will have to visit the National Archives (TNA) in person at their address in Kew.
TNA have an ongoing project to make scanned copies of their documents available via their online catalogue and so it’s well worth checking whether the information that you are looking for has been digitised before making a special visit.
I read some time back that it is recommended by various military historians that once an individual’s regiment or corps has been identified a researcher’s initial approach should then be to the appropriate regimental or corps museum.
I found my ancestor served in the 17th foot Leicestershire Regiment joining in 1864 as an Ensign, or junior officer and so I paid a visit to Leicester.
You can find details of these regimental and corps museums on the Army Museums Ogilby Trust’s website at:
On another visit to The National Archives I took the opportunity to take a look at their copies of Hart’s Army Lists, while there, and in the 1866 edition on the pages to the 17th Foot, The Leicestershire Regiment I found the entry for my great-great grandfather Ensign Edward A Massy Hay, 31 May 64.
For those who want to search the Army lists online then TheGenealogist has made this possible at their website having added a useful range from 1661 to 1940.
I have decided to reopen the membership to a second tranche of students now. So if you want to join my Family History Researcher course – aimed at beginners to intermediate researchers of English and Welsh family history – then click the image below.
This weekend I decided to revisit a line in Plymouth that I had only barely scratched the surface of in my research into the family.
My paternal grandmother’s father was called Edgar Stephens. His mother was Mary Ann Stephens nee Westlake and her mother was also called Mary Ann. Thus, in the 1851 census I was able to find my 3 x great-grandmother Mary Ann Westlake nee Legg married to Thomas Westlake the Brass Founder and Plumber that I have written about before in relation to his advertisement in the 1852 Plymouth Trades Directory.
I was looking at the 1851census records for Thomas and Mary Ann and noticed that they were both the same age, having been born in 1818.
I then went to find them in the 1861 census and noted that the transcript on TheGenealogist had Thomas’ wife listed as “Clara M Westlake” but as her date of birth was still 1818 I just put this down to an error. Opening the image I could see that the writing was none too clear, giving the transcriber a bit of a job to work out. What it certainly didn’t look like was the Mary Ann, as I had expected it to read.
Popping over to Ancestry.co.uk and the transcription for their 1851 census was given as “Chrisk W “.
Searching the same 1851 census on Findmypast and I got the transcription returned as “Catherine W”. The writing on the census page had challenged the transcribers at all three sites and I can not blame them for their differing attempts to make sense of the entry as I certainly couldn’t.
So what had happened to Mary Ann? Had she tired of her name and changed it to something more exotic? Or had she died and Thomas had taken a new wife, who also happened to have been born in the same year as he and the former Mrs Westlake?
I decided to do some detective work and search for a death of Mary Ann Westlake from after the 1851 census and before the 1861. What I found was a number of candidates that could have been my great-great-great-grandmother.
So now I approached the problem by seeing if I could find a second marriage for Thomas and here I can testify to the usefulness of the advice, given by many experienced family historians, to “always kill off your ancestors”.
You see, by having done just this for Thomas, having found his death in the records and then the listing for his probate, I was able to discover that he had an unusual middle name of “Scoble”.
Now I could look for a marriage of Thomas Scoble Westlake and I found just the two in the databases. One was in 1841 to Mary Ann Legg in Stoke Damerel, which is in the Devonport area. The other was to Christian Upcott Harwood in the last quarter of 1859 in Falmouth, Cornwall.
I had the name of the second wife!
Though this asked the question, if Thomas and Christian were wed in 1859, then what had happened to Mary Ann? The records show that in the second quarter of 1859 a death was registered in Plymouth for her, allowing Thomas to take a new wife in the fourth quarter! I will need to order a copy of the death certificate to find out what she died of.
So who was Christian Upcott Harwood? I had looked for her birth or christening without any luck. Then it struck me that perhaps she too was a widow. I now looked for the marriage of a Christian Upcott, leaving the bride’s maiden name blank, to someone called Harwood and I found one to Samuel Peter Harwood in 1841 in Lewisham. Christian was from Plymouth and he was from Plumstead in Kent. A death occurred in East Stonehouse, Devon in the year 1858 to one Samuel Harwood and I assume it was his widow who married Thomas Scoble Westlake.
If you would like more tips on researching your English or Welsh Family History then why not sign up for my tips and a special FREE report using the box below…
I love it when new records are added to the Internet as it means there is a good reason to go back and search again for those ancestors of ours that have previously remained illusive.
Well TheGenealogist have just gone and added over one million parish records for Essex, Worcestershire, Lancashire and Devon from the 1500s to the early 1800s, covering baptisms, marriages and burials. These records add to the already extensive range of parish records available on their website.
These four counties are part of some ongoing projects on TheGenealogist so keep an eye out for further releases in the near future!
Mark Bayley, Head of Development at TheGenealogist comments:
“We are committed to continually adding new records to the website. The last 12 months have seen us add over 285 million records. The demand for parish records and other early pre-1837 information is great and we are aiming to meet this demand with more such releases over the next year.”
Disclosure: The Links in the above are Compensated Affiliate links. If you click on them then I may be rewarded by The Genealogist.co.uk should you sign up for their subscriptions.
I’ve just been in West London and so I took the opportunity of a bit of leisure time to find the house where my great-great grandfather lived for a time. This was in Bayswater, way back in 1880.
Having fired up my reluctant computer, something to do with the Firefox update I think (which was making it use 99 to 100% of its cpu to do something or other!) I headed over to TheGenealogist.co.uk and searched their old directories data base.
In the Kelly’s Post Office 1880 Court Directory I found an entry for Edward Adolphe Massey Hay as:
Hay Edwd.Massey,50Princes’ sq.BayswtrWÂ
I smiled as I noticed that he had lost one of his middle names in the listing as this is something that happens to me all the time!
Switching then to the old maps website http://www.old-maps.co.uk/maps.html I located the street just north of the intersection of Palace Court and Moscow Road in South Bayswater.
I then wrapped up warm, got out my A-Z and set off with digital camera to find, photograph and generally get an impression of the surroundings that once my great-great grandfather had called home.
The house was now part of a hotel and was one of a road of houses all designed to look the same, with at least 5 stories above the ground floor and a strange protruding 4 story frontage above their front doors.
I love walking down streets that my ancestor’s have pounded in their time. As I do it I try to imagine what it must have been like in their times when the motor car would not have claimed the street outside their front steps, transistor radios would not have been blaring and the aeroplanes flying overhead would not have been heard. Instead the clip clop of hansom cabs, that prevailed until 1908, would have been in their place.
Princes’ Square garden.
Around the back I discovered a pleasant communal garden of the sort that is common in London and noticed that the design of the rear of the property was much more aesthetically pleasing to the eye.
If you would like to try to find your ancestor’s in the London Directories then check out the data sets at TheGenealogist.co.uk
I caught up with Mark Bayley from TheGenealogist.co.uk and asked him what is new on their site.
Mark told me about a couple of new records released for the Who Do You Think You Are? LIVE show.
First the Complete Casualty Lists from WWI as published by the War Office.
Secondly, the War Memorial Database.
Using their Smart Match technology you get links to various other sites from the records thus aiding your research.
Finally Mark tells me about their new Naturalisation and Denization records.
Disclosure: The Links in the above are Compensated Affiliate links. If you click on them then I may be rewarded by The Genealogist.co.uk should you sign up for their subscriptions.
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