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Researching family in Jersey, part 8: Military Records

Being rather close to the continent as it is, Jersey has had more than its fair share of unwelcome visitors. The French invaded in 1781 and the brave Major Pierson beat them back but died before the end of the battle: the artist John Singleton Copley painted the scene (some years after the event) and the resulting picture is one of Jersey’s iconic images.

 

The years that followed this were uncertain ones, and the uncertainty became worse after the French Revolution. There was a real concern that the French would try again. But at the start of the 1800s, General George Don was appointed as Jersey’s Governor-General.

 

General Don put in place a massive programme of fortification works and new roads, and alongside that he carried out two censuses in 1806 and 1815 to track where the able bodied fighting men were. In addition to this, the censuses recorded the sizes of the households and the number of women, girls and under-aged boys.

 

Transcripts of both censuses are kept at the Archive. They were originally transcribed in the original format, names by parish and vingtaine, but there is also a single combined list of names for the 1815 Census. It gives an indication of the position of the listed man of the household and whether he was an ordinary soldier, or a drummer, or providing a horse.

 

Alongside the local militia forces, the British army maintained a significant garrison in Jersey right up to the Second World War. Its main sites were at Elizabeth Castle and Fort Regent, and regiments rotated in and out regularly. The Army doesn’t maintain a single definitive list of which regiments served when in the Jersey garrison, but there are partial lists compiled by CIFHS members in the Archive. There are also a small number of baptism, marriage and burial records which were kept specifically by the garrison rather than the parish of St Helier – and these may be worth a look.

 

Nearly at the end. The next post looks at what you can get from books, newspapers and photographs – until then,  à bientôt!

 

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

 

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Researching family in Jersey, part 1: where to start

An Old Jersey House

You’ve traced an ancestor to Jersey, and you are wondering what you can find out about them. To your frustration, you rapidly discover that birth marriage and death records for Jersey are not available online. So what can you do?

Well, there are at least some useful Internet resources out there to help you get started. The most obvious one is the Census: Channel Island censuses from 1841 to 1901 are available both through Ancestry and Findmypast, and the 1911 census is on FindMyPast and will soon be fully available on Ancestry too.

A word of caution, though: the transcription is not entirely reliable on either site, and on top of that, some database search engines have problems with “divided” surnames like Le Sueur or Du Feu (not to mention Le Vavasseur dit Durell). So here’s a shameless plug: if you are going to do a lot of searching of censuses, you could do worse than purchase the paper census indexes produced by the CIFHS. They are a lot more accurate (well over 99%), and can (with a bit of fiddling) be cross-referenced back to the census images on the Internet.

There are also military records. If you’re looking at Channel Island relatives who served in the First World War, it’s well worth investigating at greatwarci.net – this is the website of the Channel Island Great War Study Group, and they maintain a very comprehensive list of people who served. The list is rather more complete than Ancestry’s transcript of what’s in the National Archives simply because Jersey residents served not only with the British armed forces but also with the Canadians and Australians. There were also at least a couple of thousand French nationals who joined up with the French military, but records for them are very scanty. If you are looking at other periods (and bear in mind Jersey had a garrison to protect it from the French right up until the 1930s), you may find references to service in Jersey on the military records of Chelsea Pensioners kept on FindMyPast, or on the GRO Regimental Indexes of birth marriage and death.

There are other useful resources too on Ancestry. There are three Channel Island postal directories – covering 1839, 1903 and 1927 – that may help to link a name to an address.

You may also be fortunate enough to find online family trees. Ancestry host them, as do Genesreunited, and there are also numerous independently-produced web sites. The general rule of thumb is to treat these as a guideline: they may be inaccurate, or they may tell the truth as far the researcher knows it – but not the whole story.

Aside from this, there’s a couple of major Internet resources based in the Channel Islands that may help you with your research. More about them next time. À bétôt!

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


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Finding Your Family Roots Using Genealogy Search Engines

Genealogy search engines are an incredible beginning point when trying to trace you family members line and discover who your ancestors were, what they did in the course of their lives and no matter whether they had produced any essential contributions to the world in any way.

Some genealogy search engines link you to internet sites which have large databases of info about folks from as far back as you are able to imagine, whilst other people make use of their own databases to help you discover the family line you’re trying to find. No matter which one you pick, it is possible to be sure that genealogy search engines can offer you an amazingly large push in the correct direction, even if they do not offer you the right outcomes appropriate off the bat. The key would be to keep in mind that you will find billions of records inside the databases you might be searching, and there may very well be hundreds of thousands of records which match you search criteria. This is why several of the genealogy search engines available let you to enter some information that refines the search even further to offer you precisely the results you are looking for.

1 of the great issues about making use of genealogy search engines is that they usually do not merely supply you having a list of sources. They are able to also lead you to other people that may possibly be looking for the exact same individual, or the identical family line that you simply are looking for. You might then locate that these folks have already observed some resources which you have been struggling to come across, while you are able to present them with data and resources that they have not yet come across. In this way, genealogy search engines provide you with genealogy resources which are proper to your search criteria, also as a network of similar people or people seeking comparable things…you might even be connected to lost cousins and household members along the way.

Whatever the reason is for your search, be certain to use genealogy search engines to create tracing your heritage that a lot less difficult.

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Why Do We Need To Know Our Ancestors?

There are several things in this world we live in that fascinate me, but do to the fact that I don’t want to write a 7000 word article, I will just tell you about one in particular. Let’s talk about family and where we come from. These days it is becoming more important to know where you come from. By that I mean we all have families, but not all of us know the beginning of our existence. Knowing about your family tree is very important.

The reason why it is important is because if we knew our ancestors, we could very well find out why we act and do the things we do. Knowing your ancestors could be good and bad in many ways.

Knowing your ancestors could be bad especially if your family has had a history of diseases that have plagued generation after generation. Most definitely you can just about determine your life expectancy knowing these things. I know that this could be a very sensitive subject, but the best thing to do is to always look for the bright side of everything.

Take for instance if you knew that your family had a history of cancer. By knowing that this is in your generations before you, it gives you a heads up on how to deal with this fact. If you know this is a severe and direct threat, you can take the necessary precautions to prevent the cancer from going undetected and eventually causing you and you immediate family stress. Once you know the facts you can take steps to help you get ready for the journey and possibly beat this disease.

Now days if you give your doctor all the ammunition needed, they can help you defeat this terrible disease. Take for instance breast cancer. We know how many families lose their love ones to this awful disease every year. Early detection has proven time and time again that people have defeated breast cancer through early detection.

We could talk about all kinds of scenarios, but they all will have the same result good or bad. Let’s just say if you are a person who just want to connect with a mother or a father that has been lost. With the right resources you could very well find that person.

So there really is no excuse to some of the things we go through these days. History always repeats it’s self that we all know. But if we learn or find a way to search for our ancestors, all your questions can be answered in full.

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How Do I Trace My UK Family Tree?

I was doing some research on the web today when I chanced on this article. I think it is worth republishing here, as the advice it give is so good.

How Do I Trace My UK Family Tree? By Mike Roy

A question I am often asked is how do I trace my UK family tree?

Taking the journey into the unknown territory of the past can be a mixture of exhilaration and tedium. You will meet with misspelt names, birth dates that vary from one census to another, missing ancestors and be led down blind alleys. But when you finally meet up with that elusive ancestor the joy of success will spur you on with your research.

Like every good journey it starts with the first step, so buckle up your genealogical seat belt and Ill guide you through the first important stages.

First find any birth, marriage and death certificates, correspondence, insurance policies, ration books, etc. These will be of great help to you as you start your research. Anything that will give you details of your parents or grandparents. Gather up as much information as you can and jot it all down to start your tree. Lay the tree out as the youngest first and work back. You can download blank family tree charts on our site if you wish, then start completing your family tree as far back as you can.

Keep detailed notes on each person. You will thank yourself for this action when you find that you are retracing back and forth to verify information. I cant stress this enough, you must be sure that you have the correct records for your ancestor, not somebody else’s. It is quite an easy mistake to follow the wrong family back through the centuries as names can be similar and sometimes the same. I found that my great, great, great grandfather had a detail double, with the same name, the same year of birth and the same place of birth. It took 2 months of research into each one, retracing details back and forth to tie in the right man! I almost felt I could claim the other man as an ancestor, I knew him so well in the end!

Your initial aim is to collect enough verified information to take you back to 1911, at which point you can delve into the world of census records and begin to unlock the doors to your past. Within the census your ancestors will come alive for you.

Don’t worry if you cant find any certificates lurking in drawers or boxes, armed with only your parents names you may still be able to trace back through the years, although you will have to buy birth and marriage certificates. I managed to trace my family tree knowing only the names of my parents and their dates and places of their birth. I needed to buy my parents’ birth certificates so that I could find out their parents details, thus keeping the trail going.

To overcome this type of problem I recommend you sign up as a member of a genealogical website, and then start searching their records. My first search was my fathers name, date and place of birth the results showed all the possible matches with my dad at the top of the list. I clicked on the link and it took me to the registered GRO entry for his birth, which in turn gave me the index reference details:

  • Surname at birth
  • Forenames
  • Year
  • Qtr. (the year is broken into 4 quarters)
  • District
  • Vol.
  • Page

Every event of birth, marriage or death registered in England and Wales is allocated a reference by the General Register Office. Next I went to the GRO website (www.gro.gov.uk) and purchased my dads birth certificate. I repeated the same process for my mum.

By supplying the index reference the correct entry can be located by the GRO and the certificate will be sent to you. You can also purchase certificates from registration offices, but if you want to research online without having to travel miles then the internet is the way to go.

I sat back and waited for the post, it took about 7 days for the certificates to arrive. I opened them with anticipation and I wasn’t disappointed. I had in front of me the full details of my grandparents, their names, addresses and occupations. I used this information to find their marriage, which in turn gave me their fathers names and this was all I needed to take me back to the census records and from there fly back in time to meet my older ancestors.

This completes the first article on how to trace your family tree. I will be publishing further articles on how to use birth, marriage and death certificate information and how to use census records found online.

Articles Source: How Do I Trace My Uk Family Tree?

ADVERTISEMENT: If you are starting out tracing your UK Family Tree then you may be interested in this downloadable book. Click the image for more information.

Beginning Family History Book
Beginning Family History Book
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Military Records in Family Tree Research

With Remembrance Sunday just passed yesterday, I guess many of you may have turned your minds, like I did, to where can we find our ancestors who fought in the wars and conflicts that have taken place.

It seems, rather sadly, that it is easier to find records for British service personnel that died in action than the survivors. There is the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, local war memorials and rolls of honour, local newspaper archives amongst other places to find “The Glorious Dead”.

If, like me, you had a father who served in the Merchant Navy in the Second World War, then you can find the details of merchant seamen’s medal cards at the National Archives documents online.

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documentsonline/seamens-medals.asp

The official journals of the the British Government, the London, Edinburgh and Belfast Gazettes are great places to start looking for promotions, awards of gallantry medals and honours and the details of the commissioning and promotions of officers in the British Army, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force.

Service Records are more difficult to find. A large number of WWI records have been lost to bombing in the Second World War, but as officer’s records were not stored in the same place, you have a better chance of uncovering these. To find a soldier requires the researcher to know the regiment and service number of their ancestor. A tip I read in the Your Family Tree Magazine last month  (Issue 96 November 2010) was that as most service men were awarded at least one medal then the name indexes to the medal rolls are a good place to start researching.


Disclosure: Compensated Affiliate.

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Family History Information Scanned So That We Can Research Our Family Trees

Have you ever wondered how a website like findmypast.co.uk goes about scanning the information for us family historians to use before they put up online?

I mean what do they have to do to actually extract all that information from the government documents so that eventually we can go online and type in our search criteria and then get to see the results?

I watched this film and was fascinated by the facts…

  • There are 18 million pages of the 1911 census of England & Wales.
  • 36 million people made up the population then, just before the First World War.
  • 10 times the number of images than the 1901 census.
  • A team of 350 people worked on the transcriptions.
  • 7 billion keystrokes were made by the transcribers!
  • 2 Kilometres of shelving housed the 1911 census before the process of scanning started.

    • Watch it here.


    Disclosure: Compensated Affiliate of findmypast.co.uk

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Ancestry.co.uk publishes prison ‘hulks’ records online.

A first for Ancestry.co.uk (Link is a compensated affiliate link) is their newly published “Prison Hulk Registers and Letter Books, 1802-1849″  This record set contains the incarceration records of nearly 200,000 people locked up in giant floating jails known as prison hulks.

The convicts’ records that are physically stored away in The National Archives in Kew, provide us with a fascinating insight into the Victorian criminal underworld and conditions aboard the Dickensian ships, which were created to ease overcrowded prisons.

Prison Hulks became an all to common place means to intern criminals during the 18th century. This was a time when many warships, previously used in naval conflicts were being decommissioned and then converted into huge floating prisons. Some of the ships that feature in this fascinating collection include HMS Bellerophon that saw action during the Napoleonic Wars, HMS Retribution, from the American Revolutionary War and HMS Captivity, a veteran of the French Revolutionary Wars.

The records Ancestry have put online, can show you who were imprisoned on these hulks and detail each inmate’s name, year of birth, age, year and place of conviction, offence committed, name of the hulk and, somewhat fascinatingly, character reports written by the ‘gaoler’ that provides an intriguing insight into the personality of each convict.

A an example, the entry for one Thomas Bones recalls that he was ‘a bold daring fellow, not fit to be at large in this country’, while the record for George Boardman explains ‘this youth has been neglected by his parents and been connected with bad company’. William Barton’s record simply reads ‘very bad, three times convicted’.

As well as featuring murderers, thieves and bigamists, the records also reveal examples of rough justice. Several eight-year-old boys were imprisoned on the hulks, as was 84-year-old William Davies, who was sentenced to seven years imprisonment for sheep stealing and later died on board the hulk HMS Justitia.

Ancestry.co.uk for prison hulks records
Click this image to go to ancestry.co.uk. -Â Disclosure: Compensated Affiliate Link.
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Your Family History Answers Maybe Off-line

Sometimes we just need to accept that not every answer to your family history questions will be on-line. I’ve discovered this with my research into my British Family Tree, but it can be the same where ever it is in the world that you are looking for ancestors. You’ve searched for an ancestor using the various on-line tools and failed to find any trace of them?

The temptation is to believe that, because they don’t appear where we think that they should, that we are simply not going to find them. Well, what I need to remind myself  when I am on the trail of my UK forebears, is that not every record for Britain is on the web and even for those that are mistakes have been made and omissions may have occurred.

Anyone with a British Family tree is well catered for by the availability of paid and free look up websites.

Taking, for example, my family tree in England. My 4 times great grandparents, John and Sarah Thorn for whom I had obtained their names from the baptism information that I had got from a search of the International Genealogical Index at familysearch.org for their son, also called John, my 3x great-grandfather.

Baptismal font St. Saviours, Dartmouth, Devon, UK.
Baptismal font St. Saviours, Dartmouth, Devon, UK.

Remembering what the family history professionals teach, that you should always use information that has been transcribed as a finding aid only – using it to seek out the original record, I visited the Devon County Record Office in person and looked up the microfiche copy of the baptism of John Brampton Thorn in St.Saviours church, Dartmouth on the 28th September 1794.

Having verified that their names were correct, on the IGI, I had then searched for the marriage of John and Sarah. I knew that a number of their children were baptised in the same church and that there was only one other possible child christened earlier than my great-great-great-grandfather in St Saviours in 1790, however it was not certain if this individual was of the same family of Thorns. I was hunting for a marriage around 1794. Frustratingly, there were no likely candidates in that particular church.

Searching the IGI around the area came up with nothing and so I expanded it outwards. With my “possible parish” list I  searched on-line for the marriage and came up with some in Exeter for 1793. Were the Thorns from Exeter? Well the answer turns out to be no!

Visiting, in person, the Devon Family History Society in Exeter I explained about my brick wall and the staff looked at their data for marriages 1754 to 1812 for a John Thorn marrying a bride called Sarah. At this point I had no maiden name for Sarah. After a few minutes, for the bargain price of only 15 pence I was handed a list of seven marriages. The very first of which was a John Thorn and Sarah Branton married on the 12 January 1794. The bride’s surname was to become the second name of their child and my 3x great-grandfather. The parish was not Exeter, nor anywhere from around Dartmouth, but Plymouth Charles!

Having obtained this information off-line I then went back to the internet just to check if I could have found it there. On the IGI there was no record and various other websites I went to all returned no matches either.

The lessons I learnt here, is that not every record is accessible on-line. Remember this in your family history research.

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Secrets to Avoid Barking Up the Wrong Family Tree

Anyone who does research will testify to how frustrating it is to follow leads up blind alleys. In terms of genealogy, this could mean following wrong family lines. Anyone who has had a go at genealogy will undoubtedly be familiar with this scenario. It could be that you have been given a bad lead or perhaps misread some information that you have found. Either way, it mounts up to a lot of wasted time.

So how can this pitfall be avoided? Far from giving you a clever answer, I don’t believe that there are any, there are some general tips that I can give that might help you with your genealogy research. In fact the general principles could be applied to any type of research.

The first thing you should always do is keep a track of all of your resources, every book, every article and every web site. And get detailed information too. If your source was a book for example, get all the detail down to the ISBN number. If your research is by word of mouth, write down names, times and dates. Genealogy is all about information, so backing up your facts is critical.

Following a similar theme, you need to organise yourself and your research. File everything and file things where you know how to locate them. You will find yourself back tracking continuously, so make that side of genealogy as painless as possible.

Check your facts. Not just the literal snippets of information that you pick up, but also the logical order of things. Do the facts that you have collected make sense? Apply common sense to all of your findings and question them.

Do not accept carte blanche research from sources you don’t know. What I mean by this is really the types of research that one often sees advertised, offering to write up your family tree for a fee. Beware of these types of offers. The type of research upon which these tress are founded are often questionable. Save your money and do the research yourself. That is after all, part of the fun of genealogy!

If your family has spread it’s wings across borders, be very careful when collecting facts. As one example, dates can be written differently depending on where in the world you are at the time. Easy mistakes can be made under these circumstances. The date 05/04/75 means something different to people in the USA than it does to people in the UK.

Do not make assumptions about any piece of information that you might come across. Stick with the facts that you yourself have collected. One small assumption can lead you in all sorts of directions that you didn’t really want to go down. Remember that we refer to things differently now than we did in years gone by, so when something is taken from letters 100 years ago, it might not mean the same thing to you as it did to your forefathers.

Join up with web sites that have expertise in genealogy. Talk with like minded people and get the benefit of their experience. Not only will they have tips of their own to share to help you, they will have access to sources you might never have thought of. It is well worth your time talking to other genealogists.

Get an extensive look at one of the most remarkable Genealogy Reference Books there is available on the market today. Discover what going on in genealogy today!

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