Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2020 i Family Tree UK

DIGGING DEEPER TRACING BRANCHES Twiglets Diarist Gill Shaw charts the rollercoaster ride of researching her family history I’d almost forgotten I had this: a digital image of young Harry Leah’s birth certificate. I bought it from the GRO months ago when I was desperate to find that at least one of my greatgrandfather’s nine siblings had been born at the Cock Inn in Cheshire. I was a litle miffed to discover Harry wasn’t, but never mind, where will he take us now? Born in 1869, Harry was barely toddling when his parents moved to Manchester, and a young man of only 17 or 18 when they died. So it’s the 1891 Census we’re after first, and he’s easy as pie to find. Harry Leah, aged 22, is living in Wallwork Street,…

RESEARCHING AT HOME Join the Family Tree Academy & become a skilled family historian The Family Tree Academy is specially created to help you discover more about the records, resources and research skills you need to become the best genealogist you can be! Read on to find out how to join in with Family Tree Academy challenges FAMILY How does it work? With professional researcher David Annal as tutor in Family Tree, we give you the chance to: In each issue of Family Tree we will be setting you new genealogy challenges to help you improve your research skills month after month. Who can join? The Family Tree Academy is available FREE to all readers of Family Tree. How do I get started? Simply study the documents we supply and…

IMPROVE YOUR SKILLS How did you do? Discover how you got on with last issue’s challenges. Family Tree Academy tutor David Annal gives the answers below LEARN THE ANSWERS TO LAST ISSUE’S CHALLENGES CHAT GENEALOGY Join the Family Tree Academy Facebook group – simply go to Facebook & search for ‘Family Tree Academy’ Last month we looked at the topic of handwriting with a focus on burial records and wills. How did you get on with the three challenges that we set you? Document A Will of Sarah Mossman, Prerogative Court of Canterbury 1857 I How does Sarah describe her servant, Mary Wagstaff? Sarah made a bequest to Mary Wagstaff, her ‘kind and valued’ servant. II The 1851 Census finds Sarah living in Shefford, Bedfordshire but her husband is listed…

BITE-SIZE FAMILY HISTORY The lunch hour genealogist Being busy doesn’t mean you have to neglect your favourite hobby, you can still learn in your lunch break! It’s time to tuck into Rachel Bellerby’s genealogy treats Know-how in under 100 words! Pedigree collapse This term, first coined by Robert Gunderson, describes how reproduction between two individuals who – knowingly or unknowingly – share a common ancestor causes the resulting family tree of their children to be smaller than it otherwise would be. Pedigree collapse is particularly common in royal and noble families, where intermarriage was encouraged to keep wealth and titles within the family and conversely, in isolated populations where people married a partner who lived nearby. Project of the month! Future-proof your research In keeping with this month’s themed video,…

Coming next in Family Tree COMING SOON THE FAMILY HISTORY HANDBOOK 2021 Our ever-popular family history mini guide is back – 100 pages packed with essential family history organisations, websites, research guides & more. Snap up your copy, free with the printed December issue of Family Tree Top 10 tips for exploring the family photo album Jayne Shrimpton shares her photo-dating expertise to help you glean the clues and discover the identities in your family photos What does genealogy mean to you? Chris Paton discusses how discovering who your family were in the past changes who you are in the present… Take The Family Tree Academy challenge Join in with our bumper end of year family history test and see how much you know! DECEMBER ISSUE ON SALE FROM 13…

NEWS World’s largest ever DNA sequencing of Viking skeletons may ‘rewrite the history books’ Newly-released cutting-edge DNA sequencing of more than 400 Viking skeletons from archaeological sites scattered across Europe and Greenland has challenged what we thought we knew about Vikings and where they came from The six-year research project, published in Nature, debunks the modern image of Vikings and was led by Professor Eske Willerslev, a Fellow of St John’s College, University of Cambridge, and director of The Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre, University of Copenhagen. The team of international academics sequenced the whole genomes of 442 mostly Viking Age men, women, children and babies from their teeth and petrous bones found in Viking cemeteries, as well as analysing the DNA from the remains from a boat burial in Estonia…

TheGenealogist Doubles the number of Tithe Maps on Map Explorer™ TheGenealogist has announced that it has doubled the number of tithe maps available on its Map Explorer, allowing users to see an ancestors’ land or property recorded on georeferenced tithe maps The 3,655 newly-added georeferenced tithe maps cover Cheshire, Dorset, Hertfordshire, Kent, Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Staffordshire and Yorkshire West Riding. Map Explorer™ features various colour and black & white tithe maps as well as modern map base layers and historical maps which are all georeferenced to allow the user to see how towns, villages and smaller settlements have changed over the years. The maps have been linked to the apportionment books so that you can discover ancestors who both owned or occupied property between 1837 and the 1850s, with some…

UNEARTHING ANCIENT NEW-FOUND TREASURES NEVER GIVE UP THE SEARCH Lost & Found – Things turn up As family historians we learn not to give up on our search for clues about our ancestors. Here Dr Diane Brook considers: the stories of inspiring discoveries of documents that have come to light many centuries later; the reasons why some treasures haven’t survived the passage of time; and excellent projects to help us piece together the past – when previously it had been thought that no records survived It made the news. Found in a Hampshire cupboard in 2006, an old book was discovered to be Robert Hooke’s minutes of the Royal Society for 1661-1682. They were not known to have survived and were valued at about million. (www.theguardian.com/science/2006/apr/01/uknews) Then, in 2015, the 800th…

IT’S TIME TO UNLOCK THE STORY OF YOUR GENES BECOME A DNA SUPER-SLEUTH! Your DNA Workshop TAKEN A DNA TEST? Now what? Welcome to the DNA Workshop! In every issue of Family Tree, DNA adviser Karen Evans will be helping you gen up on your genes, so you can: Learn practical skills with the DNA case studies Discover the latest tools, books, blogs and must-have kit to take your DNA learning further. It’s time to unlock the story of your genes… DNA is as fascinating as it is complicated. In the DNA Workshop we’ll aim to give you practical advice in understandable wording. So, whether you’ve taken a test, or are simply curious to learn more, read on! Let’s jump right in with a case study. DNA CASE STUDY Reader…

Learn about Latin Discover tips to help you interpret documents written in Latin To take your research back into the early 1700s and beyond the ability to interpret Latin will be an extremely useful skill to have mastered. Here David Annalshares some tips to get you started Before 1733, the official language of the law in England and Wales was Latin. Records of Manorial Courts, probate documents (although not, usually, the wills themselves), deeds, court and taxation records and many more were customarily written in a form of Latin, known as medieval Latin. For those of you who learnt Latin at school, it’s not quite the same, although knowledge of classical Latin is certainly a good start on the road to reading and understanding these old documents. Where might we…

FROM LONDON TO FRANCE, GERMANY & RUSSIA… In search of my errant grandfather For a long time Jackie Robinson avoided researching her family history as she knew it would be addictive – but in 2008 she gave in and is now a very happy and self-confessed family history addict! Here she relates her quest to find out more about her elusive grandfather The search (I thought) was to locate a bigamist grandfather that supposedly nobody knew anything about. I had seen his name once on my parent’s marriage certificate, in a drawer, but only fleetingly wondered why my dad had his mum’s maiden name and I never bothered (or dared) ask why. One evening, at a friend’s house, just to see, we put my nan’s name and birth date into…

DISCOVER RESEARCH SOLUTIONS YOUR FAMILY MYSTERIES SOLVED Your questions answered With our experts Jayne Shrimpton, Graham Caldwell, Adele Emm and Colin Rogers Could they be the same pair in later life? QPlease can you date these photos? The photo of two younger boys dates to circa 1870. James, seated on the right, was born in 1864 in Singapore. The later one, possibly taken in Singapore or Hong Kong, shows the same James on the left, but I have no information about the younger boy (standing) or the handsome card-playing figure on the right of the later photo. Dating the later photo would perhaps be a helpful lead in establishing whether they could be the same pair, and to identify the mystery boy/man! Mary Jackson AThese are both professional studio photographs but…

Is your name on the endangered baby names list? Names that have been very popular in years gone by are about to become extinct Researchers at Flowercard used ONS data of baby names for girls and boys in England and Wales from 2000-2019, and then looked at a number of names that were popular in 2000 but had decreased in popularity dramatically in 2019, as well as a number of other names that are far less popular in recent years. Next, they calculated the percentage by which the popularity of the name had dropped from 2000 to 2019 to present their list of 100 endangered baby names above. See the full top 100 endangered baby names list on our website: http://familytr. ee/endangered…

THINK: NAME, DATE, PLACE WHERE CAN I FIND…? IT ALL DEPENDS… Your family history BMD self-help guide The Family Tree family history BMD self-help guide is designed to help you begin finding the records and resources you need to look at next, in order to learn more about your ancestors’ births, baptisms, marriages, deaths and burials, with Helen Tovey When I was a child my mother bought a book called something like ‘The Family Doctor’. By answering a series of yes/no answers to the questions in the book you could end up diagnosing yourself with all sorts of things, which, with the glibness of a healthy child, I thoroughly enjoyed doing. Over the years, I’ve noticed that when advised where to start with their family history, the new genealogy enthusiast is…

PUTTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT FILLING IN THE GAPS INVISIBLE PEOPLE Some people are easier to trace than others in the records. Adèle Emm has found this in her research, and feels sure that you will have too. Here she mulls over why this might be, and offers solutions to help you shed light on their elusive existence… Whilst enjoying the # Story OfOurStreet project (www.family-tree.co.uk/how-to-guides/story-of-our-street/) have you realised there are people you can’t see living in your road? Invisible People. You might not find them; after all, they are invisible. Women are frequent candidates; those companions, maiden aunts, nieces, an unmarried sister-in-law; appendages living on relatives’ ‘charity’. We meet them in novels; Miss Bates derided by Austen’s eponymous Emma. Absent from the records Genealogy magazines and forums constantly receive requests from…

RESEARCHING AT HOME Documents In Depth - #10 - Post-1813 marriage register Printed marriage registers were introduced on 1 January 1813, at the same time as printed baptismal and burial registers. Hardwicke’s Act of 1753 had set out the basic form of the marriage entry: A.B. of [this/the] Parish… and C.D. of [this/the] Parish… were married in this [Church/Chapel] by [Banns/Licence] with Consent of [Parents/Guardians] this Day of in the Year by me J.J [Rector/Vicar/Curate] This marriage was solemnized between us A.B. C.D. in the Presence of E.F. G.H. The Act stated that all pages in the registers were to be sequentially numbered and ‘ruled with Lines at proper and equal Distances from each other’ but it fell short of imposing the use of printed registers. In the event, most parishes decided…

HAVE YOUR SAY Your letters A mysterious diary, requests for help, shared memories, insights and more The mysterious Brockdish diary The article on diaries in FT July reminded me of one such diary written in the late 1700s/early 1800s and presented several years ago to the Norfolk Record Office. The author lived in the Waveney Valley on the Norfolk/Suffolk Border and writes of the area around the villages of Brockdish and Syleham on either side of the river Waveney. One of our local historians, Timothy Brook, obtained copies and proceeded to transcribe the diary adding various notes as he proceeded. Unfortunately Tim died before he could finish it and we are attempting to complete his work. To follow are the late Tim Brooks’ words. Mysteries of the ‘Brockdish Diary’: I…

JOIN THE FAMILY TREE FAMILY! SUBS CLUB EXCLUSIVE Welcome to the Family Tree Subscriber Club. Members not only save money and get every issue delivered to their door, but can also get free access to our online library of video tutorials! Not a member? Find out how to subscribe on page 58 Get free access to Family Tree Academy’s fantastic growing collection of online video tutorials, packed with expert tips to take your research to the next level! Michelle Leonard’s new video on how to combine your DNA results with your traditional research to really boost your chances of ancestor hunting success is the latest addition. It is packed with useful case studies making for a very practical learning aid to improve your DNA know-how. See the collection so far…