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To coincide with the announcement of a UK general election in June, TheGenealogist has released over 100,000 Parish Records and thousands of voter records on its website.
The People’s Will, Voting by Ballot at a Parliamentary Election from TheGenealogist Image archive
In time for the snap general election, TheGenealogist is adding to its Polls and Electoral records by publishing online a new collection of Poll books ranging from the late 19th century to the early 20th century.
These new records released today offer a tantalising snapshot of our ancestors interaction with the Church and the State of the past.
Find the names of people and their ‘place of abode’ in the electoral registers
Discover the nature of their qualification to vote, such as possessing a Corn Warehouse, a Workshop, a House, or owning a Brewhouse
Some of the earliest records in this release reach as far back as 1209 when the king who was known as Johan sanz Terre(John Lackland) ruled the country
The Parish Records are one of the most useful of all resources for family historians as they can be used to find the baptism, marriage or death of an ancestor at a time before the civil registration of births, marriages and deaths
The records cover 35 different registers of people who were entitled to vote in Wakefield, West Yorkshire and other constituencies situated in Hampshire, Gloucestershire, Somerset and New Westminster in Canada. These have been added to our Poll and Electoral Roll collection covering millions of records.
Historical Register of Voters
At the same time TheGenealogist continues to expand its vast Parish Record collections with the addition of 100,000 new individuals added for the County of Worcestershire and additionally the Registers of the Parish Church of Rochdale in Lancashire that covers the period between 1642 and 1700.
Also being released at this time are some records that will take the researcher all the way back to ancient times!
The Roll of Mayors of the Borough and Lord Mayors of the City of Leicester records the names of men holding that office from between the 10th year of the reign of King John in 1209 and all through history to 1935.
The first Mayor listed in the Roll of Mayors of the Borough and Lord Mayors of the City of Leicester
The first Mayor listed in the Roll of Mayors of the Borough and Lord Mayors of the City of Leicester
The Worcestershire Parish Records were added through a partnership with Malvern FHS while the electoral records are taken from the official lists produced to record who was entitled to vote in the various parliamentary elections.
Disclosure: Please note this post contains affiliate links.
TheGenealogist launches millions of new Parish records as well as their New British in India Collection
TheGenealogisthas just announced three important releases to coincide with the Who Do You Think You Are? Live show covering Britain and British India.
Over 2.5 Million people in the latest release of Parish records!
Augmenting the substantial Parish Records that are already available on TheGenealogist comes the release of more than 2.5 million people for two major counties:
Hampshire Parish Records (Bishop’s Transcripts) (886,616 individuals)
This brings their total number of records to 3,199,820 with coverage of
Baptisms: 2,379,836 (1538 to 1940)
Marriages: 495,034 (1538 to 1940)
Burials: 324,950 (1538 to 1940)
Durham Parish Records (1,697,206 individuals)
This brings their total number of records to 1,850,068 with coverage of
Baptisms: 1,253,273 (1556 to 1919)
Marriages: 198,845 (1540 to 1896)
Burials: 397,950 (1538 to 1939)
These will be a boon to Family Historians looking for key events in the lives of their ancestors.
The British in India Collection
The TV series ‘Indian Summers’ starring Julie Walters created in many a fascination with India under British rule. This new record set reveals information about those ancestors that lived in the subcontinent, their lifestyle and the communities that they lived in.
‘E’ Company Winners of the Inter-Company Football Shield 1910
Millions of British people went out to India in the past and so many family historians will have an ancestor that made the journey. For some, India would turn out to be their last resting place and among their ranks were merchants, soldiers, sailors, civil servants, missionaries and their families.
To browse the Image Archive for relevant photographs search for the tags ‘India’ and more specifically ‘Hill Station’ for pictures like the one below.
Nainital Civil Service Week c1900
Parish Records of British in India
Headstone Records of British Cemeteries in India
British War Memorials in India
East India Registers
Indian Army and Civil Service Lists
Image Archive – British in India
The release of The British in India Collectionon TheGenealogist now allows family historians to search for ancestors who went out to British India in a very broad-ranging set of resources ranging from the early 1800s up to the 1920s.
These records make up part of the Diamond subscription to TheGenealogist
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.
My research this week has hit a number of the inevitable brick walls that most family history researchers find litter the path to seeking out our elusive ancestors in the records.
I know just how frustrating it can be when we are trying to add people to our family tree and the wretched people just don’t seem to be anywhere to be found.
If you find yourself in that situation then my advice to you is, 1 – Don’t panic! 2 – Take a deep breath and 3 – Take a step back.
I was asked to write a piece for TheGenealogist on the actor Sir Ian McKellen to be live on their website before the Who Do You Think You Are? programme went out.
The very first thing I did was to see if I could find his birth in the General Register Office (GRO) birth records. To my frustration he was not there!
What did I do? I calmly considered what was the likelihood of him not being recorded, against there having been a mistake made in the records (I didn’t panic, or curse the online portal that I was using). I took a deep breath (point 2) and ran the same search at a second site to see if the record would be returned there. Unfortunately, there was no sign of him there either. It was time to take a step back (tip 3).
Often, when we can not find an ancestor, it can be for the reason that some sort off error has crept into the data; or the record was incorrectly written down at the time it was created. A little lateral thinking and Ian McKellen was eventually found to have been mistakenly recorded in the GRO Index for the April-June quarter of 1939 under the surname McKellar.
This neatly illustrates what can happen in the official birth, marriages and death records, as well as in other sources. The birth would have been reported to a local registrar shortly after Ian McKellen was born on the 25 May, 1939. Perhaps the writing was not clear at that stage? With census records, or baptisms, we have to also consider that the official, such as a census enumerator or the vicar in the church, misheard the name.
Even if the surname had been given correctly to the local registrar and faithfully noted in their records, they would have copied their information and sent it on to the GRO – did they make a mistake at that stage? Or was it when the GRO collated it into the index that most of us will use to order a certificate from?
Another stage that mistakes can happen, although not in this particular case, is when these indexes go online. The website will have created a transcription of the data in order that their search engine can find the entries when we type a name into their search box.
This week I came across an example of a transcription error, one that can be easily forgiven when I opened up the image of the census to see a florid capital J that looked exactly like an S. I was searching for someone with the first and middle names of Frederick and John. For some reason, however, they had been enumerated by only their initials F.J. and then their surname. The top of the J had a short twist to the right and nothing to the left so making it look for all the world like an S.
My advice for family history researchers, who are having difficulty finding their ancestors in the records, is to stop; breathe; and think. Consider the possibility that your ancestor really is there in the records, just not quite correctly recorded as you, or probably they, would have liked.
Compensated affiliate links have been used on this page
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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I watched the first programme in the new BBC series of Who Do You Think You Are? with a certain amount of extra interest this week. As the show revealed that the cockney actor, who plays the landlord of the Queen Vic in East Enders, was descended from Albert Buttivant I became a bit concerned when Danny Dyer started talking about French ancestry.
You see, I was involved in putting together the article for TheGenealogist website, which you can read here.
Our research had not traced Albert Buttivant, the one time inmate of the Old Town Workhouse, back to France and so I wondered where the show was going! Imagine my relief, as our article had already been published on TheGenealogist’s website, that the programme quickly got back on course and identified the line to be the same as the one that we had found back to East Anglia.
I watched nervously as they made the same connection as we had to the landowning ancestor named Robert Gosnold (1587-1633), a member of the landed gentry with a coat of arms. It is the Gosnold family connection that gives Danny a gateway ancestor into blue blooded forebears via Thomas Cromwell. The self taught lawyer who had risen from being the son of a blacksmith to be the Chief Minister to Henry VIII only to lose the king’s favour and end in execution on Tower Hill.
As we had guessed correctly – the marriage of Thomas Cromwell’s son Gregory to Elizabeth Seymour, sister of Jane Seymour and Henry VIII’s third wife, was Danny Dyer’s link to royalty. We knew that this was where the programme would be heading, as it had been widely trailed in the press in the days before; but it just goes to show how many of us mere common people could possibly find a drop of diluted royal blood in our own ancestry if we looked far enough back and had a spot of luck.
What the programme didn’t tackle, however, is the strength of the Seymour’s claim to royal blood and with it Danny Dyer’s claim. It is through Jane and Elizabeth’s mother, Margaret Wentworth, that a descent from the blood-royal of England was maintained by the family. The assertion is that it flows in their veins from an intermarriage between a Wentworth and a supposed daughter of Sir Henry Percy (1364–1403), known as Harry Hotspur, who was the eldest son of the 1st Earl of Northumberland. Hotspur had married Elizabeth Mortimer, grand-daughter to Lionel Duke of Clarence the third son of King Edward III of England.
At the time of Jane Seymour’s marriage to Henry VIII few people would have dared to dispute a pedigree with the king and he was convinced that his bride was a royal cousin. In the TV episode Danny’s pedigree was presented on a beautiful scroll by a Herald from the College of Arms, who is an expert in the oldest families of the realm. So it does make me wonder, is that a line drawn under that particular dispute then?
TheGenealogist sent out an announcement this week about launching over 220 million US records.
The details are as follows:
90 million Social Security Death records 1935-2014
1940 Census Images containing 132 million records with searchable transcripts linked to the Enumeration Maps
Irish immigration records for 604,596 persons arriving in New York 1846-1851
Many people hit a brick wall where an ancestor seems to disappear from all the records in the U.K. It could be that they have gone abroad for a period or emigrated for good. If your elusive ancestor went to the United States of America, TheGenealogist’s expanded international records can help.
Social Security Death Records
The U.S. Social Security Death Index is a database of over 90 million death records. These give information of those who died from 1936 whose death has been reported to the Social Security Administration.
The data includes: Given name and surname; Date of birth; Month and year of death (or full date of death for accounts active in 2000 or later); Social Security number; State or territory where the Social Security number was issued; Last place of residence while the person was alive (ZIP code).
1940 Census
The American census is searchable by first name, surname, age, state, county, street address and place of birth (allowing us to find Brits enumerated in the American census). The records give details of over 132 million individuals with a transcription along with the actual image of the schedule. Where available, the record is also linked to the Enumeration Index Map for the area so that you can see exactly which street your ancestor lived on. TheGenealogist says that their transcripts also have the added benefit of street addresses included, allowing you to search for a street rather than an individual.
The 1940 Census transcripts on TheGenealogist are not the same as those found elsewhere online; apart from the linked maps and street addresses, they have also audited the images discovering many that haven’t been transcribed previously elsewhere. These are also being added to their records.
TheGenealogist believes that experienced researchers will welcome this release, knowing that having alternative transcripts to those already available gives the family historian a better chance of finding people whose names have been difficult to read or have contained errors in the other databases.
New York Immigration Records
The New York Port Arrival 1846-1851 series gives the family historian access to useful information about immigrants from Ireland to the United States during the era of the Irish Potato Famine, identifying 604,596 persons who arrived in the Port of New York and giving the name of the ships on which they arrived. Approximately 70 percent of the passengers listed were natives of Ireland, with the rest being nationals of 32 countries that included Canada, Brazil, Saint Croix, Russia, Morocco, the United States and various European countries. Information contained in these records include name, age, town of last residence, destination, passenger arrival date, and codes for the passenger’s gender, occupation, literacy, native country, transit status, travel compartment, passenger port of embarkation, and the identification number for the ship manifest.
These new records join TheGenealogist’s growing collection of other U.S.A. data sets such as the WWII PoW records, Early Settlers and Emigrants to America, Passenger Lists, American Wills, Almanacs and Directories.
New religious occupational records on TheGenealogist
If your ancestor held a prominent position in a religious organisation then you may find them in amongst a number of recent releases at TheGenealogist.co.uk. The new records include:
The Year Book of The Church of England in the Dominion of Canada 1926 & 1935 – These year books contain the details of the members of clergy in Canada.
New Zealand Methodist Union Index 1913 – Listing details of Methodist Ministers and their placements in New Zealand up to 1912.
Catholic Directory 1867 & 1877 – Directories of Catholic Clergy with addresses for England, Scotland and Wales.
Biographical Dictionary of English Catholics 1534 to 1885 – This work by Joseph Gillow gives biographies of prominent Catholics which often include details of their family, education and achievements.
Shropshire Roman Catholic Registers 1763-1837
The Roman Catholics in the County of York 1604
Various Catholic Record Society volumes – These include a variety of interesting records including various Catholic Church registers, memoirs and letters of prominent Catholics and Recusant Rolls.
Jewish Year Books 1896-99, 1901-8, 1910-11, 1918-21, 1925, and 1928-39 – These year books list the details of prominent people within each synagogue, obituaries, Jewish officers in the Army, Navy and Auxiliary Forces, Ministers, MPs, Peers, and even Jewish ‘Celebrities’ of the time.
Jewish Synagogue Seatholders in London for 1920, 1922, 1925, 1927, 1929, 1931, 1933, 1937
The Clergyman’s Almanack 1821 & 1822 – These Almanacks list archbishops, bishops, dignitaries, MPs and Peers.
Register of Missionaries 1796-1923 – A register of the missionaries and deputations of the London Society of Missionaries. This book includes many details about each missionary, as well as listing their wives (including their maiden name).
Durham Diocesan Calendar 1931
These records compliment an already wide range of religious occupational records such as Cox’s Clergy Lists and Crockford’s Clerical Directories, Jewish Seatholders, Catholic Registers, and Directories already on TheGenealogist.
Diamond subscribers can access these records by going to the Search tab on the home page – scrolling down to Occupational Records and then selecting the type of records that they are interested in.
This Press Announcement came from the team at TheGenealogist:
TheGenealogist adds to its growing collection of Parish Records with the release of those for Nuneaton & North Warwickshire.
Released in partnership with the Nuneaton & North Warwickshire Family History Society there are over 454,000 new fully searchable records of individuals
Allowing the researcher to discover more than 300,000 people recorded within the baptisms from this area in the heart of England
Family historians can also discover the details of over 90,000 individuals from marriages and nearly 60,0000 people listed in the burials of Nuneaton & North Warwickshire
Nuneaton & North Warwickshire FHS worked with TheGenealogist to publish their records online for the first time, making 454,525 individuals from baptism, marriage and burial records fully searchable.
“The officers of Nuneaton & North Warwickshire Family History Society are delighted to be working with The Genealogist to bring their collection of baptism, marriage and burial transcriptions for north Warwickshire online…” John Parton (Chairman)
With some of the surviving records reaching back into the 1700s this is an excellent resource for family historians to use for discovering Nuneaton & North Warwickshire ancestors.
The records are also available on TheGenealogist’s Society website FHS-Online.co.uk where societies get 100% of the income.
“This new initiative will provide for those researchers preferring online access, while allowing us to continue offering the data on CD. NNWFHS members have opportunity to take out an enhanced subscription which includes access to the data.” John Parton (Chairman)
This is an ongoing project with the society working on transcribing many more records.
“We’re delighted to welcome NNWFHS to both TheGenealogist and FHS-Online. This release adds to the growing 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.” Mark Bayley (Head of Online Development)
If your society is interested in publishing records online, please contact Mark Bayley on 01722 717002 or see fhs-online.co.uk/about.php
Examples from Nuneaton & North Warwickshire Parish records
In these records can be found the famous novelist, poet, journalist and translator George Eliot, under her real name of Mary Anne Evans. She was born in Nuneaton and baptised at Chilvers Coton All Saints church in 1819 – she used the pen name of George Eliot in order to be taken more seriously as a writer.
For the settings of the stories, Mary drew on her Warwickshire childhood. Chilvers Coton became Shepperton. Shepperton Church is described in great detail in The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton, and is recognisably that of Chilvers Coton.
Also to be found in these records are members of her family that she used as inspiration for some of her characters. For example the record for her sister Christiana Evans, baptised in 1814, contains a relevant note by the society that reveals: Sister of George Eliot. Christiana, ‘Chrissie’ as she was known to her family, was the original of: “Celia” in ‘Middlemarch’ & “Lucy Deane” in ‘The Mill on the Floss’.
If we search for Mary Anne’s brother, Isaac Pearson Evans who was born in 1816, there is a note which tells us that he was the brother of George Eliot and that he was the basis of Tom Tulliver in “The Mill on the Floss”.
Another person to be found in these records is a Henry Harper, born 1830, whose mother Anne has the note: Anne Harper – daughter of Rev. Bernard Gilpin and Mrs Ebdell (“Mr Gilfil” and “Caterina”) and was the son of “Mr Farquhar – the secondary squire of the parish” in “Scenes of Clerical Life” by George Eliot.
Additionally there is Isabell Adolphine Gwyther born in 1834 and Edward James Wilson Gwyther born in 1837, who share a mention that reveals: The Rev J Gwyther was Curate of Coton. He and his wife were the originals of “Amos & Milly Barton” in ‘Scenes of Clerical Life’ by George Eliot, “Milly Barton” was the mother of six young children.
Using these records you would also be able to find the death in 1836 of Christiana Evans, the writer’s mother.
This week the team over at TheGenealogist announced the completion of thier project to release fully searchable Norfolk Parish Records online. For anyone with ancestors from this county this is brilliant news.
Over 6.23 million new searchable Norfolk Parish Records released in partnership with the Norfolk Record Office
This final tranche includes over 5.95 million records for Norfolk
Plus more than 276,000 records relating to the boundary areas of Suffolk
Adding to the 3.6 million individuals already released earlier
TheGenealogist has successfully completed a project to release over 9.8 million fully searchable records for the registers of baptisms, marriages, marriage banns and burials for Norfolk with images of the original registers.
It is now easier than ever to research Norfolk ancestors in the parish registers of this Eastern English county. With some of the surviving records reaching back as far as the early 1500s, this is a fantastically rich resource for family historians to use for discovering Norfolk ancestors.
Released in partnership with The Norfolk Record Office, the registers of baptisms, marriages, burials and banns of marriage cover the majority of parishes in the Diocese of Norwich. This also includes a number of Suffolk parishes in and near Lowestoft that make up the deanery of Lothingland. Also covered by this release are the parishes in the deanery of Fincham and Feltwell that were part of the Diocese of Ely in south-west Norfolk.
Examples of famous people to be found in these records include:
Edith Cavell, the First World War Nurse executed by the Germans for treason was born in the South Norfolk village of Swardeston. Her baptism can be found in the register of Swardeston for February 1866 where her father was the vicar and performed the christening ceremony. With a single click family historians can see an image of the actual entry in the parish register.
Edith Cavell’s baptism record in the Norfolk Parish Register on TheGenealogist
Likewise, Horatio Nelson – who would grow up to become perhaps Britain’s best known naval hero of all time – was also baptised by his clergyman father. In Nelson’s case it was in the the village of Burnham Thorpe on the North Norfolk coast in 1758.
Horatio Nelson’s baptism 1758 in the Norfolk Parish Registers on TheGenealogist
Another British seafaring hero, whose baptism can be found in the Norfolk parish records on TheGenealogist, is Henry George Blogg. He would grow up to become known as the “Greatest of the Lifeboatmen” and be highly decorated. In his case, however, it was not his father that baptised him. His entry in the register reveals a less than auspicious entry of this Norfolk hero into the world – the vicar wrote in the parish register of Cromer that Henry was “base born”. Blogg, however, became a skilled seaman and a lifeboatman. For the many rescues, that he took part in as the coxswain of the Cromer lifeboat, he was awarded the gold medal of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution no less than three times and also the RNLI silver medal four times. He was also honoured with the George Cross from the King, the British Empire Medal, and a series of other awards.
Norfolk Parish Registers on TheGenealogist: Henry Blogg’s baptism 1876
Five years after his birth, Henry’s mother, Ellen Blogg, married a fisherman called John Davies. It was this stepfather that taught Henry how to fish and the skills that he needed to be a highly competent seafarer. The marriage banns for Henry’s mother and stepfather can be found in the Banns book for the parish, within the new records on TheGenealogist. Their actual marriage can also be found recorded in the parish register for Cromer included in this new release. See the records at: www.thegenealogist.co.uk
Banns of Marriage records from the Norfolk Parish Registers on TheGenealogist
To search these any countless other useful family history records take a look atTheGenealogistnow!
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