Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2022 i Family Tree UK

ALL ABOUT FAMILY HISTORY The Community Archives and Heritage Group of the Archives and Records Association (ARA) is looking for nominations for their annual awards Every year the Community Archives and Heritage Group (CAHG) gives awards to outstanding groups and projects. Last year it presented awards to three groups under the categories of: • Community Engagement (2021 winner Clements Hall Local History Group, York) • Gathering and Preserving Heritage (2021 winner and overall winner: Leavesden Hospitals History Association) • Wellbeing (2021 winner Age Cymru Dyfed – West Wales Veterans Archive) To enter your group for the 2022 awards, simply send a 200-word statement that tells the ARA what you value about your community archive. Is it the new stories you discover about the people you work with? Or maybe the…

ALL ABOUT FAMILY HISTORY Over 2.1 million new records from Berkshire have been added to Findmypast BAPTISMS, MARRIAGES & BURIALS Nearly 1 million transcripts make up this baptism record collection, spanning almost 400 years of history. Rich biographical details even occasionally note the father’s occupation or the mother’s marital status. Examples of foundlings, orphans and children born outside of marriage can also be found. Dating from 1536 to 1991, the Berkshire Burials sometimes even note the circumstances of death. Additional details may also include a relative’s name and relationship to the deceased, plus residences. Records of marriages and banns cover 1538-1931. You might spot your ancestor’s age, marital status and occupation, and often witnesses to a marriage. These record transcripts have been published in partnership with Berkshire Family History Society…

GLEAN EVERY LAST CLUE FROM YOUR NAME Why, how and when did surnames come into use? Wayne Shepheard answers all these important questions in his foray into researching the origin of family names The use of surnames is a relatively recent circumstance in human history. Many past societies have used second names to distinguish people and families, but the modern world’s adoption of formal last names only dates back about 700 years. I first wrote about this subject in an article published in the Journal of One-Name Studies (Shepheard, 2018). In that piece I described information obtained from a medieval church document, Liber Vitae Ecclesiae Dunelmensis (the Durham Book of Life), and posed the following questions: • Was there an underlying reason why people began to use, or at least…

FLESHING OUT THE FACTS Michael Thorpe tells the story of how a seemingly ‘ordinary’ family history was transformed with the discovery that his mother was once a sergeant major at an important communications centre in Whitehall As with most genealogists, work on the family tree does not start until it’s too late, and is often due to the desire to know more. So, my army history of my mother relies mainly on photographs and ephemera found during the sad duty of clearing out the old family home following my mother’s admittance to long term nursing care in an old folk’s home. The known facts Alice Louise (Lou) Munk was born on 1 August 1909 in St Pancreas, the middle child of five. Her parents were Joseph Munk (a railway worker…

TRACING FAMILY IN THE UNITED STATES Gill Shaw is a long-time family history enthusiast, but it’s only recently that her papertrail has led across the ocean to America. Here she gets to grips with the records available, and unavailable, for tracing folk in New York in the late 1800s CLICK TO VIEW the entire page showing the Marshalls on the 1875 New York State Census. It’s interesting to see how the questions asked change as the years go by. CLICK TO VIEW the entire page showing the Marshall family on the 1880 US Federal Census at 628 Dean Street, Brooklyn. I feel I’m scrabbling around in the dark half the time, searching for my Riboldis in America. For every squeal of delight, there’s a wail of despair. The delight when…

ALL ABOUT FAMILY HISTORY Historic England has announced its Everyday Heritage Grants: Celebrating Working Class Histories, which will fund community-led and people-focused projects that focus on heritage, linking people to overlooked historic places Does your local railway, mine or factory have a fascinating story to be told? Is your coastal or rural town filled with tales about the people who previously lived and worked there? Have you always wanted to celebrate the cool architecture of the place where you live? Each project should enable people to creatively share overlooked or untold stories of the places where they live and encourage communities, groups and local people to examine and tell their own stories in their own ways. Historic England is also looking for projects that provide ‘innovative volunteering opportunities for young…

ALL ABOUT FAMILY HISTORY Genealogist Chris Paton revealed the news on his blog (scottishgenes.blogspot.com) that the contract to provide the 1921 Scottish census transcription has been awarded to Queen’s University Belfast. According to the National Records of Scotland website, the census will become available to the public ‘in the latter half of 2022’, although the Queen’s University contract notes that two six-month extensions could be made available at the purchaser’s discretion. With thanks to Fergus Smith of Old Scottish for the original heads-up on this news.…

ALL ABOUT FAMILY HISTORY COVID-19 is the current event that will be of most interest to the historians of tomorrow, beating Brexit, climate change and the refugee crisis, 41% of Britons have said in a survey conducted by the Wolfson History Prize The results of the survey highlight the British public’s view of 2022 as a key year in history, with over 40% of those surveyed believing that the global pandemic will be the defining issue for historians when they study this period in the future. To mark the 50th anniversary of the Wolfson History Prize this year, the survey asked the British public which decade in the past half century was most historically significant, with the 2020s coming out on top at 39%. The survey also showed that the…

OLD OCCUPATIONS Long, long hours and low wages were the lot of our ancestors who plied their needles: Adele Emm takes a look at their lives and working conditions in Victorian times Sewing at once, with a double thread A shroud as well as a shirt. (Thomas Hood 1843) With 267,791 people plying their trade of dressmaker/ milliner in 1851, this made it the seventh most populous occupation. Beaten into eleventh position were 152,672 tailors. Seamstress/shirtmakers tagged behind at 73,068. Overall, 493,531 individuals worked in the clothing trade and all were undertaking or had completed an apprenticeship. Many, however, worked appalling hours for pitiful wages – so why do it? One reason was the beckoning bony finger and shame of the workhouse. The second, a seamstress/dressmaker was considered far more…

HOW TO USE KIRK SESSION RECORDS Following the recent online release from ScotlandsPeople of kirk session records, Richard Morgan explains exactly what these records are, why they were created and how they can be used for Scottish genealogy purposes Kirk sessions were formal minuted meetings of a parish minister with the elders of his church. The online availability of kirk session records from ScotlandsPeople is excellent news. Civil registration came to Scotland in 1855. Before that date the main resource is the old parish registers. These have serious inadequacies. In Alan Stewart’s book My Ancestor was Scottish is a table showing by county the number of baptisms in the Old Parish Registers of 1854 compared with the number under the new compulsory Civil Registration of 1855. The figures are startling;…

FAMILY PROJECT Dr Robin McConnell shares some ideas about encouraging the children in your life to think about their place in the family tree, and how to record their own life and times Children are seldom involved in any depth to make family history a research adventure.Thoughtful and innovative family leaders, however, can foster the following. • The involvement of all family members in a new shared family project • The development of a unified family through family team leadership • The utilisation of present skills and acquisition of new skills • An enhanced understanding of history and its personal relevance • The overcoming of elements of family member isolation • Developing a life-long family history interest with each family member Record the lives of the children in your life…

TACKLING A BRICK WALL Theresa Green talks us through a brick wall project that has spanned the decades, as she charted the travels of her ancestor William Tennant from Scotland, to Gibraltar and across the Atlantic to the island of Grenada, all in a seemingly simple quest to find his place of birth My favourite TV programme of all time has to be Star Trek. From seeing the original episode in the mid-1960s, on a blip of a TV with a 6’ black-and-white grainy picture, I was well and truly hooked from day one. What I loved about the programme was the way the captain and crew would find themselves in all kinds of impossible situations – yet Captain Kirk always, somehow – against impossible odds – would manage to…

DISCOVER RESEARCH SOLUTIONS QMy earliest memories of family history include being told that my great-great-grandfather, Francis Mills (1843-1908) was the illegitimate son of Sir Francis Burdett. The story was often repeated at family events that he did little work and collected an allowance from the cashiers of Coutts & Co at 440 Strand, London. This meant that his son, Francis Burdett Mills (1875-1951) had enough money to start and run his own dairy in Wandsworth, which he eventually sold to United Dairies in 1924. This story is commonplace in the families of the offspring of Francis Burdett Mills. I took little real interest in genealogy until my father died in 2010, when I was handed a box of old photographs by my mother when clearing out his things. Starting in…

Family history books with Helen Tovey & Rachel Bellerby WHERE WILL YOUR READING TAKE YOU? Deserters of the First World War: The Home Front by Andrea Hetherington Th deserters who were shot at dawn and pardoned a century later is a familiar one. But alongside these 306 UK soldiers are the stories of another 80,000 men charged with desertion and absence and tried at courts martial on the home front. Andrea Hetherington has researched these stories to describe those men who disappeared from camps and barracks within Britain, hiding from the authorities, sometimes turning to crime to survive, or enlisting the help of family and friends to evade detection. The author paints a nuanced and compassionate picture, showing us through many different examples that there was usually much more behind…

ALL ABOUT FAMILY HISTORY The Archives for Learning and Education Section of the Archives & Records Association (ARA) UK & Ireland has published an Accessible Learning Toolkit to help archive services to become SEND-friendly The toolkit aims to give archives the tools to help ensure that children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) can engage meaningfully with archives. The kit has information, ideas, tools and language to help increase accessibility and inclusion of children and young people with SEND in archive services which are SENDfriendly. A number of archive services and their partner organisations collaborated on the toolkit, providing case studies and sharing their experiences with colleagues in online workshops. John Chambers, chief executive of the ARA (UK & Ireland) said: We are very proud to…

ALL ABOUT FAMILY HISTORY 20 million records spanning over three centuries have been added to FamilySearch recently, with notable additions for both Switzerland and the USA FamilySearch have added 10 million new indexed records from United States City and Business Directories (c.1749 to c.1990), and 10 million Church records from Switzerland (1418-1996). Switzerland Catholic and Lutheran Church records This collection spans the years 1418-1996 and includes baptism, marriage and burial records. The records are written in German and Latin and you can get help in reading these at the FamilySearch Wiki https://familytr.ee/guidance. Explore the records on FamilySearch at https://familytr.ee/swiss.…

This month, Paul Chiddicks presents a code breakers theme involving postcard messages, and shares a genie-celebrity challenge for readers to try... The theme to this month’s edition is code breakers, as we take a look at some secret coded messages written on postcards, along with some that tell a wonderful story of ambition and achievement. We also have the usual mix of the unexpected, the unusual and the amusing things we discover whilst researching our family trees. Can you crack the code? We start this month’s edition with an email from a ‘celebrity guest’, none other than forensic genealogist Morton Farrier. Morton has written into ‘Dear Paul’ asking if our readers can help decode this postcard he has received. He writes: Dear Paul, My name is Morton Farrier and I…

UNLOCK THE STORY OF YOUR GENES Welcome to the DNA Workshop! In every issue DNA adviser Karen Evans will be unpacking a reader case study, helping you learn how to use your DNA research at home. It’s time to unlock the story of your genes… Making DNA work FOR YOU This month, Karen Evans takes a long-standing mystery that has deepened with the use of DNA matches. Can working with these matches show the identity of a paternal grandmother? JANET WRITES: I read your column in Family Tree magazine with interest each month. It is amazing what advancements in solving family relationships DNA has made. I have a family mystery which I think may intrigue you and a question – can you triangulate DNA to give a likely place for…

SHOW ME WHAT YOU GOT, 1921 Diane Lindsay has been dabbling in the newly released 1921 Census, expecting no real surprises. But how wrong she was... new facts and new myseries abound Ididn’t visit the 1921 Census till well after the midnight release, telling myself: a) prioritise, and search strategically; b) pace yourself and spend wisely; c) do not let curiosity send you off on a tangent; d) don’t do anything till you’ve cleared your desk to get at your PC, currently buried in all those photographs you were sorting before Christmas hit you like a bang on the head, as indeed it always does because you spend more time doing Family History than baking mince pies for the freezer. However, next night, my insomniaready iPad, with dog and Sir…