Tag: village

Posted on

Fantastic Map Resource for Family Historians

http://www.nls.uk/ I’ve been having a lot of interesting fun playing with the many maps on the National Library of Scotland site. NLS give access to some historic high-resolution zoomable images of over 91,000 maps of Scotland and beyond.

Initially I was using it to superimpose the old OS 1:10K 1900 map on to the modern satellite image of the plot of a long demolished ancestors house in Fife (see the hatched building in the image on this page). By using the slider, that changes the opacity, I was able to see exactly where the house had been in relation to the ground today. All that remains are the stables and the farm buildings that make up part of the modern farm and no sign from the air of the villa that once stood on the plot.

It is not just maps of Scotland that can be found on this brilliant website as I was able to select an English county and chose between different series of the Ordnance Survey and the modern hybrid view from the air for a village in Leicestershire that I was interested in not to mention the coverage for London.

The better family historians will always try to gather together as much information on their ancestors as possible so as to be able to place their forebears squarely into the contemporary environment in which they lived.

The bare genealogical facts of names, dates and places go only so far to build a family tree, whereas finding out about the social and physical landscapes of your past family’s lives can help you to understand the challenges that faced them.

Landscapes can and did change over time. The enclosure of land and the movement from rural employment to working in the cities, as the industrial process grew had an affect on past generations. The building of the railways and roads, which may have disrupted their lives as well as provided new communication routes for them to travel down can often be seen by looking at various map series over time.

For those of you researching your English/Welsh family history and have hit a brick wall, maps are covered in more detail in a module of the Family History Researcher Academy.

 

————————

 

 

Learn more about English and Welsh family history resources which can be used to find your elusive ancestors with the Family History Researcher Course,

CLICK the image below:

Family History Researcher English/Welsh course

 

Send to Kindle
Posted on

Hearth Tax Records from 1662 identify a family

HearthI have been looking into the English family tree for a client that lives on the other side of the world recently.

It was easy, using the census and BMDs to quickly trace the family line back from Surrey and the South London area in the 1960s to Shoreham in Kent around the middle of the 18th Century. There then followed a nice trail, in the parish church registers, of one generation after the next being baptised following obvious marriages of the parents. Suddenly, however, I lost the connection as one set of parents seemed not to have conveniently married in St Peter and St Paul, Shoreham.

As it happened I had noticed that the Hearth Tax Online website http://www.hearthtax.org.uk/ had published a 1664 Kent Hearth Tax list and with one click I was able to see the return of names for the various parishes of the county.

Scrolling to Shoreham I found one incidence of the client’s family surname and so we can suppose that if we could trace his line back that this is where it would point to.

While this Hearth Tax payer in Shoreham may have been an ancestor, I can not advise my client that this is definitely so. What I have told him is that his family may well have been living in this village at the time that Charles II’s government hit on the idea of taxing his citizens at 2 shilling a hearth in the late 17th century. It helps us see where the tree is possibly pointing as we do more research in the primary records.

Hearth Tax Online

The hearth tax was a type of property tax on the dwellings of the land payable according to the number of fireplaces the occupiers had. The 1662 Act introducing the tax stated that ‘every dwelling and other House and Edifice …shall be chargeable ….for every firehearth and stove….the sum of twoe shillings by the yeare’. The money was to be paid in two equal instalments at Michaelmas (the 29th September) and Lady Day (25th March) by the occupier or, if the house was empty, by the owner according to a list compiled on a county basis and certified by the justices at their quarterly meetings. These quarterly meetings conducted within each county were known as the Quarter Sessions. The lists of householders were an essential part of the administration so that the returns of the tax could be vetted and for two periods 1662-6 and 1669-74, one copy of the relevant list was returned to the Exchequer and another was held locally by the clerk of the peace who administered the Quarter Sessions.

Taken from the Hearth Tax Online website http://www.hearthtax.org.uk/ 

 

Learn more about resources you can use to find elusive ancestors with the Family History Researcher Course:

 

Learn more about English and Welsh family history resources which can be used to find your elusive ancestors with the Family History Researcher Course,

CLICK the image below:

Family History Researcher English/Welsh course

 

Send to Kindle
Posted on

A Newly digitised, navigable atlas collection details 500 years of British history

 

County map courtsey of Ancestry.co.ukAtlas shows us how Britain’s landscape has changed over the last 500 years

Looking at this collection of 57 maps and you will be able to find England’s lost counties of Westmorland and Huntingdonshire

Find Parish borders that hark back to when people associated more with their Parish church than town hall

There is a newly published historic atlas of Great Britain online at Ancestry.co.uk that gives the family historian something of a unique view of the countries of England, Scotland and Wales stretching back over 500 years.

Digitised by the family history site Ancestry.co.uk, the Atlas and Index of Parish Registers, consists of fifty seven different maps of the counties of the U.K. What is interesting to me about this is it shows how Britain’s ancient parish and county boundaries have changed shape over the centuries.

We have all been there in our research. You may have lost someone from the records of a
particular county and thus you become stuck unless you can see the boundaries as they stood at the time that your ancestor was alive.
I was doing some research for a client whose ancestors came from Northfield. Today that is a suburb of Birmingham and so is in the West Midlands. At the time of their ancestor Northfield was in Worcestershire.

The subject of the research got married about ten miles away in Dudley, which was in Staffordshire at the time and today has its own archive service as it is a Metropolitan Borough. Thus to find the records of a family that lived in quite a small radius needs careful thought as to where to look.

This newly digitised Atlas is navigable online, users are able to scroll over whole counties and then use a zoom tool to go in and out. Useful if you need to identify the various local parishes, towns and the churches.

The original documents used in the atlas are from the resources of the Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies.

Browsing the maps open up quite an insight into how England’s historical county maps didn’t change much for centuries, before many of the ancient counties were split up to make more governable areas.

In this atlas the county of Middlesex is shown as it was in the 19th century. At that time it consisted of what are today large swathes of modern London and so included the likes of Islington and Chelsea. London itself is a much smaller settlement that is barely more than one mile wide.

The Home Counties appear in their original form before the legislation of the London Government Act 1965  created Greater London. You will also be able to see the original boundary of the counties of Essex and Surrey when viewing the maps.

Other counties that are defunct today but can be traced in the atlas include Westmorland (today a part of Cumbria), and Huntingdonshire, which disappeared into Cambridgeshire following a Government Act in 1971. Lancashire is also to be found here in its original form, comprising of modern day Manchester and Liverpool and also various parts of Cumbria and Cheshire. It was subsequently reorganised and downsized, losing nearly a third of its area in the process.

Before the population of the country grew over the centuries and along with this regional administration developed, people were inclined to identify themselves more with their local parish when considering where they came from. As time moved on and these parish borders changed to such an extent that now it is almost impossible to determine the exact location of some parishes and their records using modern maps.

I have an interest in a small village that sits today in North west Leicestershire, but in years past was divided between Leicestershire but with pockets residing in Derbyshire and completely surrounded by Leicestershire on all sides!

The Atlas is thus an authoritative guide to the drastic changes in Britain’s county and parish borders over the last 500 years and a valuable way of adding geographical context to family history research.

The maps were the brainchild of Cecil Humphery-Smith, a genealogist and heraldist who founded the Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies, based in Canterbury, which promotes family history both through courses and its extensive library. He is, of course, the author of Phillimore Atlas & Index of Parish Registers.

At Ancestry.co.uk, the maps can now be searched and browsed by county.   For family historians using Ancestry’s Lancashire Parish records as well as the 1851 Censuses and Free Birth, Marriage and Death Index will discover that every record in these collections links to a relevant map.

In addition, almost eight million new records have been added to the Lancashire Parish records currently available on Ancestry’s site.

Ancestry.co.uk Senior Content Manager Miriam Silverman comments: “The borders of the UK parishes and counties have changed so much over the last 500 years and that really makes these maps the key to navigating the past and progressing with your family history journey.”

To search the Atlas and Index of Parish Registers, as well as millions of additional birth, marriage and death records, visit www.Ancestry.co.uk.


Disclosure: Compensated affiliate links used in this post.

Send to Kindle
Posted on

‘National Union of Teachers’ War Records from 1914 to 1919

 

I was passing by a village war memorial this week, still resplendent with its poppy wreaths from the  remembrance day service. I took to wondering about who these named individuals, carved in stone, were and what their lives had been before they went off to fight and die for their country.

So it is sort of apt that I just got this in from TheGenealogist. It deals with the National Union of Teacher’ War Records, giving some insight into one set of professionals who answered the call to go to war.

 

The Diamond subscription on TheGenealogist now has over 18,000 new records to access from the ‘National Union of Teachers’ War Records from 1914 to 1919. These records include a list of teachers who joined the forces, those who received honours, and also those who were sadly killed, plus other information relating to the National Union of Teachers during the war.

J Harrison V.C. M.C.

Covering all N.U.T. members who served in the war and also discussing issues of the time, such as pensions, salary levels of teachers who joined the army and fund raising for relief in Europe.

 

The records are a comprehensive list of members of the National Union of Teachers who served in the Great War. The teaching profession and its members responded to the great nationwide pressure to ‘do their bit’, with most male teachers of service age answering the call to arms.

The ‘National Union of Teachers’ had a number of courageous medal recipients amongst its members. Listed here is 2nd Lieutenant Jack Harrison of the East Yorkshire Regiment. He was killed in May 1917 in Oppy Wood, France aged 27. After having earlier won the Military Cross for bravery, he was posthumously awarded a Victoria Cross for single-handedly attacking a German machine gun post to protect his platoon. His body was never found.

He taught at Lime Street Council School in Hull and also played rugby league for Hull FC as a prolific try scorer. He is listed among the ‘Gallant War Dead’ in the records along with the name of his school.

Hull War Dead

 

The records provide an interesting insight into how a specific profession and its union coped with the events of The Great War. Taken from the National Union of Teachers War Records 1914 to 1919 publication, the records can be found in the War Service Lists in the Military Records section on TheGenealogist.

Mark Bayley, Head of Online Content at TheGenealogist comments: “The war affected so many lives, but it can often be hard to trace records for those who survived. This is why TheGenealogist is committed to providing more unique records of those who survived, whether they are casualty lists, prisoners of war, or in this case full service lists for specific professions. We are aiming to continually add more of these specialist records to provide family historians with more unique data at their fingertips.”

Take a look at TheGenealogist.co.uk to search these records.

The Genealogist - UK census, BMDs and more online

Disclosure: All links are compensated affiliate links.

Send to Kindle
Posted on

Want To Know What Your Ancestor’s Town Looked Like?

 

Jersey - St AubinSomething that I have always believed in is that family history, as opposed to straight forward genealogy, needs the lives of our ancestors to be put into the social context of the times that they lived in. One of the really powerful ways to do this, I find, is to look at images from the past.

For that reason I am really bowled over with the new addition to TheGenealogist’s website that gives us a taste of what life was like in the times of our ancestors, through the medium of old photographs.

TheGenealogist has become the first family history website to launch a dedicated new Image Archive, which includes hundreds of unique 3D photos and thousands of standard images dating from 1850 to 1940!

What is brilliant is that the new Image Archive is a free to use service that allows researchers the opportunity to relive the past through the eyes of their ancestors at: www.TheGenealogist.co.uk/imagearchive

If you are a Diamond subscriber to TheGenealogist then you will have further access to the Image Archive to download the images in a high resolution format for the greatest possible clarity.

The Image Archive is fully searchable using the title of the photo itself, or you can  just add a keyword to narrow down your search as I did to look at St Aubin, a village in Jersey, which is a place that is particularly well known to me. I can recognise buildings that are still there today, such as part of the current Spar shop that was, circa 1900 when the photograph was taken, Beresford’s General Supply Stores.

I then flipped to London and a view of Fleet Street, which I know from a stint working in a travel company based in what was an old newspaper office there.

Then on to Birmingham and to view streets that I can recognise have changed little from the first floor up (Corporation Street, for example) and those that by the time I lived in that city, in the late 1970s and 80s, had been demolished to make way for new schemes. So, by using this website, I could see what the Bull Ring looked like in the past. Then there was Five Ways, that I only know as a huge three lane roundabout, but was an atmospheric setting in the old images on TheGenealogist.

 

All the photos are rated so you can see which photos are of the highest quality. There is also a selection of main search categories and sub-categories to help you find photos of interest, quickly and easily. They are also rated for quality so you can see how good the picture is before you download it.

Hundreds of the images are available in stunning 3D to really bring the past to life!

3d picture from TheGenealogist

With scenes of the hustle and bustle of Market Day to the drama of war, there is a selection to view as both 3D moving images or as 3D Red blue images or in a standard format if you prefer. Digitally enhanced by creative experts at TheGenealogist, add a greater depth to that photo from the past!

Take a look for yourself here.

Disclosure: All links are compensated affiliate links.

Send to Kindle
Posted on

Are you related to President Lincoln?

I’ve had an email from genealogist and author Anthony Adolph this week. For long term readers of this blog you may remember that he provided me with a fantastic interview at the Who Do Yo Think You Are? LIVE back in 2011 which you can revisit here if you so wish.

Genealogist Anthony Adolph
Genealogist Anthony Adolph

Well Anthony wanted to draw my readers attention to a project that he is involved with to find people who may be related to President Lincoln.

It is to help celebrate the British launch of Steven Spielberg’s movie ‘Lincoln’ and the 204th anniversary of the president’s birth on 12 February, that he is working with the Illinois Office of Tourism to find British relatives of America’s most famous president.
In 1637, Samuel Lincoln, an apprentice weaver in Norwich, left his home in the obscure Norfolk village of Hingham to brave a voyage across the Atlantic. Samuel had no idea he would survive to raise a family in the new colonies of America, let alone that his great great great grandson Abraham would become one of the greatest figures in American history.
This means that if you have ancestors from Hingham or have Lincoln ancestors from the Norwich area, you could have President Lincoln in your family tree!
Illinois, the home state of Abraham Lincoln, hosts many Lincoln attractions and is a great place to visit for a truly adventurous holiday, where you can visit the house Lincoln shared with Mary Todd, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum and the Springfield cemetery where he is buried.
If you know of a family connection with the Lincolns of Hingham, Norfolk, please contact Anthony Adolph via www.anthonyadolph.co.uk. You could be in for a trip to Illinois!

——————-

 

Send to Kindle
Posted on

Researching family in Jersey, part 5: Nailing down dates without certificates

Jersey Archive
Jersey Archive

As I mentioned last time, there are occasions where you find something in the BMD indexes and you can’t get to Royal Square in time to see the certificates. But there are two sets of data in the Archive that can help you to nail dates of marriages and deaths down.

The first is what is referred to as the “third copy” of the marriage registers. Individual parishes maintain their own registers and then send copies of the certificates to the Superintendent Registrar to compile the full volumes. However, in between the two the Superintendent Registrar maintains draft registers – and it is this that the Archive now possesses.

To access the draft registers, you need to use the Reference search facility on the OPAC. The collection reference you need is D/E: this will get you to the top of the collection. Reference D/E/B covers the third copy, and you will find that it’s divided into individual collections from specific Church of England churches and general collections of nonconformist and civil marriages from 7 parishes. It’s not quite a complete set, but the vast majority of material is there and you will find that most of the time there is at least some degree of correlation between the indexes and the draft registers.

As far as recording deaths goes, the simple answer is that there will almost always be a burial shortly afterwards. There are two ways that you can attack this problem: one is to look at the records kept by the cemeteries, and the other is to check the funeral directors. Cemetery records exist for two of St Helier’s major burial grounds – Almorah and Mont à l’Abbé – between about 1860 and 1950, and there are also records for some of the other burial grounds around the island including Macpéla, the non-conformist cemetery at Sion Village. These are all in folders in the reading room. One cautionary word: women are indexed by their maiden name only (although the married name is given).

The Archive also received a major deposit from a local funeral director the other year, containing records of seven of their predecessor companies, some of which go back to about 1820. Again, you’ll need to use the OPAC’s Reference Search, and this time the collection reference is L/A/41. Be aware that for any given period you may have to look at two or three different companies’ books – but feel free to enlist the help of the volunteer from the Channel Islands Family History Society if you need advice. These records are fascinating, because they will tell you not only who was buried when, but how – the relative spends on funerals vary from parsimonious to lavish – and also who paid for it.

Death is one of the great certainties in life: taxation is the other, and we’ll take a look at that next time. Until then – À bétôt!

Guest blog by James McLaren from the Channel Islands Family History Society

Send to Kindle
Posted on

Nonconformist buried in my family tree.

As you may know, if you have been following me for any length of time, that Devon is one of the areas of the U.K. that I research my ancestors in. Some of my Devonian forebears turned away from the established Church of England and became dissenters. There seems to be a rather limited number of nonconformist chapel burial records actually surviving within the county of Devon and so this can be a bit of a brick wall for us. Many family historians may well have found that in their own family trees, ancestors left the Church of England to practice their faith in other Christian churches.

By the law of the land, people of each and every denomination could be laid to rest inside their parish churchyard. Although this was the case, however, the relatives of people who were nonconformists were not allowed to have a Church of England burial service at the graveside. This would be fine if all the deceased’s family were no longer C of E, but I would guess it could be upsetting for family members who had not joined their relation in nonconformity and so would have wanted a service conducted by the local vicar!

I was intrigued to find out that people who held offices within the “establishment” were affected by another piece of legislation. I am talking here about Councillors as well as some other municipal officials. These worthy people were not allowed to put on their robes of office to attend the funeral of a non conformist councillor and this would have included the wearing of a mayoral chain etc. Should they rashly have broken this rule then they were liable to a fine of £100 and in addition they would likely end up being barred from civic office throughout the rest of their lives!

Many nonconformists, however, did not wish to be interred within land held by the Church of England. Quakers, most especially, established their own unique burial grounds. In these, the family historian will discover, plots defined by somewhat plain, uncomplicated stones that usually feature only the initials belonging to the departed.

A number of chapels established their own burial grounds, this included the Independents, Methodists as well as the Baptists. Furthermore, if you go researching your nonconformist ancestors in several country places in England, you will find that burial grounds were opened for all those involved with the various nonconformist denominations and would not specifically be confined to only one or other of the particular religious faith traditions. Around 1880 a welcome change, in the laws of England & Wales, granted the possibility for the family of a person, being laid to rest within a Church of England parish graveyard, to opt for a minister from their own religious beliefs to be able to preside over the burial service. This began the downfall in making use of separate nonconformist burial grounds as they were often less popular because of the fact that, in some cases, they were several miles from the particular village or district from where the deceased’s family resided. In 1853 and following on from the considerable overcrowding of church graveyards and burial grounds, due in some measure to the number of cholera fatalities and so forth, Parliament handed down a further law closing a large number of these areas to fresh internments. The result of the law saw many towns as well as bigger parishes setting up cemeteries, to look after the continued burial of the deceased.

To find earlier burial grounds nowadays isn’t always that simple a task. In an ideal world you would be able to find someone who possesses the required local knowledge of their location and is also willing to assist you in your research. I’ve had the happy experience of this while I was researching my family in Cheltenham, England. The local history society, as well as an amateur historian from one of the bigger churches, were luckily able to help lead me in the right direction to find my ancestor, for which I was very grateful. The basic scarcity of registers, nevertheless, will most likely make it tough if you want to research for names.

A further point, that you may need to take into consideration when researching your forebears, is that if the deceased was very poor and given a “paupers” grave, then the name of the unfortunate will not have been marked down in the burial records except for a numbered peg entered to locate the grave.

Lastly, I’d like to pass on this story that I have found reported in various places about a Church of England husband and a nonconformist wife wishing to be buried together. It is mentioned, for example, on the Bristol Times website thisisbristol.co.uk that in Arnos Vale Cemetery there is an elaborate monument raised for merchant Thomas Gadd Matthews (C of E) and his wife Mary (Congregationalist), which famously straddles both Anglican and nonconformist sections. The story seems to be that Matthews purchased a large grave plot strategically placed so that the two, while wishing to be true to their respective faiths, could be buried in a family plot that sits on the boundary line between the C of E and nonconformist parts of the cemetery. A rather lovely tale!

Send to Kindle