Tag: weekend

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Brick Walls in Family Tree Research

I was reading a newsletter, from someone I respect, in a completely different field of interest from family history this weekend. In it he was talking about obstacles in the paths of people that are trying to achieve something, whether it was in sports, business or any other pursuit.

Nick James runs a membership site that caters for people that want to run an internet marketing business and in this week’s tip he recalled advice that a life coach had given him to physically write down your stumbling block in a paragraph or two and then to draw a little picture next to it. The picture could be a fence, a brick wall or whatever you chose to depict the problem that you face.

The idea behind this is that by so doing the brick wall no longer exists as a theoretical problem. It now takes on a concrete form that you can now deal with. I have a special note book into which I enter my problem ancestors and this acts in very much the same way for me.

In my family tree I have various lines that seem blocked and so I decided to tackle one of them this week end by seeking the help of an expert and talking through the problem with them. Now I did this by making use of the excellent facility of a telephone consultation provided by the Society of Genealogists’ Family History Advice Line on 020 7490 8911. It is available on Saturdays: 11am-1pm and 2pm-4pm and also on Thursdays: 6pm-7.45pm. I came away with ideas for further investigation that just might help me unlock the problem that I have of an ancestor whose occupation in the marriage register was a mariner. He turned up in a maritime city and married a local girl (of this parish) but did not provide posterity with any clue as to his parish or where he had sailed in from!

Society of Genealogists

At the end of this month Who Do You Think You Are? Live returns to Olympia from the 24th to 26th February and one of the popular benefits of attending this event is the the Society of Genealogists Family History Show will be part of the weekend. Apart from the talks given there is a fantastic chance to book some time with an expert who can help you look at ways to tackle your obstinate brick wall. A chance to speak one-to-one with a local, regional or specialist expert may be what is needed to allow you to get through your brick wall.

For more useful tips to research your Family Tree then download my Kindle book by using the button in the box below.

 

Disclosure: The links in this post are Compensated Affiliate links. If you decide to buy the product I may receive a commission.

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Fantastic Society of Genealogist Course!

Society of GenealogistsI’ve been to London this weekend and, on Saturday, I attended a great course at the Society of Genealogists on My Ancestor Came From Devon given by the society’s Genealogist Else Churchill.

Over the afternoon we were introduced to what we would be able to find in the library at the SoG in Charterhouse Buildings and where to look on the internet for Devon sources.

The talk encompassed sources for beginners to beyond and if you can’t make it down to Devon itself and find getting to London easier, then what is available at the SoG really is a good alternative for anyone who, like me, have Devonian ancestors.

I shall be returning to this lecture in a future post, but today I’d just like to mention some of the resources that were highlighted by Else Churchill.

The Society of Genealogists has registers for about 10,000 parishes. It houses published indexes and finding aids including the Devon FHS publications and also has many transcripts and indexes in microfilm and CDs.  There are various trade directories spanning from 1783 to the 1930s in the library and poll books particularly from Exeter and Plymouth.

Many of us subscribe to one or other of the subscription sites, but very few of us can afford to belong to more than one or two. Well that is where a visit to the SoG  can be useful as they have free access to a number of the pay per view websites so allowing us to do searches on the sites that we don’t subscribe to ourselves. This is an important resource for the family historian, as often the way the database has been transcribed can have a bearing on what you are able to find on one over another. So if you have hit a brick wall and can’t find a forbear on one site then it is worth looking on another. Also one may be stronger for the counties that you are interested in. Findmypast turns out to be particularly good for Devon.

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WDYTYA? LIVE show at Olympia 2011

Who Do you Think You Are? LIVE 2011
Who Do you Think You Are? LIVE 2011

Just published a video on my Youtube channel from the Who Do You Think You Are? Live show from last weekend.

http://www.youtube.com/user/NoseyGenealogist

WDYTYA? Live is, as many of you know, the UK’s largest family history show. It’s a great place to find over 200 family history exhibitors all under the one roof. The stands ranged from The Society of Genealogists, Ancestry, TheGenealogist.co.uk, findmypast to small business and the various Family History Societies.

Also of fantastic value were the many workshops going on throughout the three days.

More videos will be added to the Who Do You Think You Are? LIVE pages on this blog. See the pages tabs above.

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Who Do You Think You Are? LIVE 2011

Well, that was a great weekend!

You have probably guessed that I spent much of Friday, Saturday and Sunday at the Who Do You Think You Are? Live show at London’s Olympia. I got to take in some informative workshops, talk to many like minded family historians and even interview a few people on the stands for a forthcoming video section of this blog.

But who and what I gleaned will have to wait as Murphy’s Law struck and the laptop that I have been lugging around has played up and is refusing to help me update you.

Just as soon as I can, normal service will be resumed!

Who Do you Think You Are? LIVE 2011
Who Do you Think You Are? LIVE 2011
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Use more than one ancestor look up site!

I really need to remember my own advice to use more than one ancestor look up site!Ancestors in Thorne Family tree
On the occasions when I find myself talking to someone new to this family history pastime, about doing ancestor research, I often find myself going back to the advice that I have been given by a professional genealogists. Now I do not consider myself to be anything like a Genealogical Guru, I am simply someone who has gained a little experience over the years and now am happy to pass on two of my tips here. Both are about stepping back from the research results and introducing some careful thought into the proceedings.
  • Think logically about a person’s time-line.
  • Listen to family stories, but then step back and try to corroborate them with hard evidence to confirm what you have been told.

A person’s date of birth is obviously going to dictate an approximate time for when they could have got married and when you should reasonably expect them to have died. A little thought will tell you that rarely will a person be getting married in their hundredth year! Likewise, they are not going to be getting wed aged 6 or 7 either. Beware of entries in databases that just happen to have the same name as your ancestor, but are just plain and simply the wrong people. But even then we can go wrong if  we are not careful.

One weekend, when doing some family tree research,  I got myself stuck in a hole and wasted oh so much time digging it deeper and deeper! What was it I was doing wrong and how did I finally get out of it? Well I was trying to find the details of an ancestor’s death so that I could purchase a death certificate from the GRO site.

I am fairly wedded to www.ancestry.co.uk for most of my research. I like what they have on offer and I have become use to the way the site works. I also have a subscription to other sites such as www.thegenealogist.co.uk which I find good for many searches and then there is another favourite of mine:  www.findmypast.com.  (Disclosure re these links: Compensated Affiliate.)

The research I was doing had been initiated by reading some “thoughts” put down on paper by a relative before he died. I had been shown this family history because, as a cousin, I had an ancestor in common with them and I wanted to enter this forbear into my family tree as well. The handwritten notes indicated that our ancestor had died aged 66 and from this I was able to work out that as they were born in 1865. From this I then worked out that they probably died in 1930.

I went on to ancestry.co.uk and searched by name for the ancestor in all four quarters of 1930 but to no avail. I then broadened my research for ten years either side and spent hours looking for them without any luck. I then thought I’d try misspellings of the ancestor’s name as this, I thought, is surely why they are missing. Result: A big fat nothing!

Eventually, after much wasted time, I thought about using one of the other websites that offers Birth marriage and death details, something I should have done early on. And what did I find? There he was, on the other BMD site spelt correctly and dying in the district where I expected him too, but aged 70 not 66 and in the year 1935 not 1930!
The lessons for me to relearn and hopefully for you to benefit from are as follows:
  1. Remember that all websites are fallible and omissions happen.
  2. Family stories can sometimes be wrong as humans are not blessed with 100 percent recall and we can get things wrong, as it would seem this relative did in his writings for his children!

I have made myself a note to remember my own advice in future: Use more than one ancestor look up site and remember that stories can be wrong!

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Search Lost Relatives! How To Easily And Effortlessly Look For Someone You Lost Contact With

Lately my wife’s sister got curious about what
had happened to her first husband after they broken up. That marriage had
finished badly and they hadn’t been in touch for almost
thirty years. She tried hunting for her ex-husband’s name on Google and
Yahoo but didn’t get any hits. Knowing I do research online in my work as a
qualified writer, she asked if I might discover
anything.

I write for business and technical magazines, so I
use numerous high-priced databases for in-
depth research. However I suggested she
try an easier alternative- a way out I use myself when I want to
search for somebody quickly and without difficulty. I
recommended she try one of the people search database services. Even the
better ones cost so little, they’re practically free. Most offer a trial
period. I gave her the name of one to try.

She was dubious. She’s not very comfortable using her computer for much
more than email. Her stab at the search engines had already left her
upset. Now she was going to have to “sign up for something and
learn something completely new… oh my goodness,” was the way
she put it.

Yet, later the same day I suggested it, she emailed back excitedly.
In a few minutes, she’d discovered all kinds of information
regarding her ex. It turned out that he’d done something of a turnaround after they’d
broken up. Their divorce resulted from
clashes over his severe drinking problem. After they got separated,
though, he’d ultimately gone back to med school, gotten his MD and become an
orthopaedic surgeon. He’d even been instrumental in
developing some kind of device used by other
physicians in his field.

Regrettably, the poor fellow had passed, but at least my sister-
in-law discovered reassure in knowing that things had
worked out for him in spite of everything. She remarked that even if their relationship ended in the most awful imaginable way,
it had began from a good point. She said she hadn’t actually wanted to contact
him. She just wanted to know what had happened to him.
At times all we want is only to satisfy our  inquisitiveness about what happened to someone we’ve lost
track of. Many of us have an old pal or associate we still think about.
A Better Way to Find People

I suspect that’s what makes people searching so hot. As many as half a million
times a month, somebody searches on Google alone, hunting for
a way to find a lost person. Whether it’s someone from the past with
whom we’ve lost touch, or somebody we met last weekend and
desire to see again, were always hunting for others.

Unluckily, many general searches fail. Just like Googling
failed for my sister-in-law. The information is out there, somewhere. But being
forced to sift through so many unrelated results makes it nearly
impossible.

By the way – majority of searchers don’t know this –
search engine results don’t really extend beyond about a thousand entries. Even
when the search engine results page says they found millions and millions of hits, they don’t
really bother to expose it and give you access to all of it. They’re
actually only estimating from their own database tables. Even they
understand it’s a waste of time.

When You Choose a Personal Search Service, Here’s What to Seek

If you choose to try out a personal search database, here are the things I’ve
found essential to mull over during a review

Free versus Paid

I’ve been dissatisfied by the free services. Their main concern
seems to be to try and get you to click on some of the pay-per-click ads
they’re presenting.

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