Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2023 i Family Tree UK

VIDEO CONTENT TAP HERE to watch Helen Tovey’s welcome & introduction Family history absolutely never fails to surprise and delight, does it? Those twists and turns in people’s lives, the moments that just stop us in our tracks, and make us sit back and think. Woven through the pages of Family Tree this issue, for instance, we stumble across the true tale told by Gill Shaw of a Victorian orphan sold to a French vicomte and subsequently the heiress to his magnificent riches. We timetravel back, with Sue Greenwood, to the coastal community of Flamborough Head and its famous lighthouse – and the people who worked day and night there in all weathers, especially bad weathers, to keep seafolk safe. We pause by the burial plots – the records and…

This year’s overall winner was Dream Time Creative (Wakefield) for their work gathering and preserving the heritage of the forgotten women of Wakefield, Yorkshire. Winners in other categories were Glenside Hospital Museum, Bristol and Remembering the Past, North Tyneside. The judging panel also highly commended the Scottish Jewish Archives Centre, Sunny Bank Mills, Leyland Historical Society and Headford Lace. They will also be awarding a Certificate of Special Achievement to the Scottish Jewish Archives Centre for sustained best practice. The CAHG reported that the judges struggled to choose a winner in a very close contest between the three category winners but eventually settled on Dream Time Creative for the ‘sheer breadth of their endeavours, the work they had put in to creating long term sustainability and the achievement of Wakefield…

Sources, documents, records, data, facts, information, evidence. They’re similar terms and can be easily confused. Of all these the most important is evidence. Knowing how to define, classify and use genealogical evidence is an essential skill for all family historians. Building blocks All family history research is based on three main building blocks: Sources, Information and Evidence. Last month we talked about sources and how to classify them as Original, Derivative and Authored. We discussed that sources themselves aren’t information, they’re containers from which information is extracted. In considering information, we discussed how to classify each information item as Primary, Secondary or Undetermined. We highlighted the ability to have higher confidence in primary information and the need to corroborate secondary and undetermined information. This month we’re going to address evidence.…

Family history can be an awe-inspiring adventure, leading us through newly discovered paths, breathtaking stories and old photos that give us goosebumps. However, very often when we embark on such a journey, we are so overwhelmed that it feels more like stumbling into a thick and dark forest. One of the main platforms I use – both to search and to store my research clearly and methodically – is one that has increasingly gained prominence among genealogists and family history enthusiasts, namely MyHeritage. As an expert genetic genealogist, I have witnessed firsthand the power and potential of MyHeritage in unraveling the mysteries of the past, with its vast collection of historical records, DNA matching capabilities, and intuitive family tree-building tools. There are many ways one can explore genealogical records and…

Children of the house of Cleves: Anna and her siblings by Heather R. Darsie The four children who are at the heart of this book are Sybylla, Anna, Wilhelm and Amalia, whose parents were Johann III Duke of Cleves and Maria of Julich-Berg. Through their aristocratic parents, the four siblings were descended from the kings of England and France and – as any Tudor enthusiast will know – Anna became the fourth wife of Henry VIII of England. This was a family at the heart of the religious fervour that gripped Europe in the 16th century and each of their lives would be affected by the turmoil of the Reformation. There are of course, many names, dates and events covered in this sweeping history and I found it very helpful…

SIGN UP TO OUR NEWSLETTER FOR WEEKLY NEWS & EVENTS: https://familytr.ee/reg ONSITE EVENTS STOP PRESS! Bristol & Avon FHS fair, 23 September The event will include a number of regional family history societies who will be able to offer you advice and guidance on research into your ancestors. Also in attendance will be local record offices (archives) and national organisations. A number of local history groups will be attending to reveal the work they have done on their districts and communities and to give tips on how to research and record the history of your own areas. British Aerospace Welfare Association (BAWA) Leisure Centre, Southmead Road, Filton BS34 7RG; e-mail: fhfair@onmicrosoft. com; website: www.bafhs.org.uk Accredited Genealogists Ireland Open Day and Workshop, 7 October Whether you are practising as a professional…

Rachel Bellerby reports on the latest genealogy news. Got a story to share? Email editorial@family-tree.co.uk Created by Henry Bell, a 19th-century entrepreneur from Helensburgh, Comet was a wooden paddle steamer, built in Port Glasgow by John Wood & Sons in 1811-12. Designed to carry passengers between Port Glasgow and Helensburgh, the name ‘Comet’ is a direct reference to the Great Comet of 1811, a celestial event in which a comet passed by the earth and was visible to the naked eye for 260 days. Comet was operational for eight years on the River Clyde, then the River Forth and from September 1819, on a new Glasgow to Fort William service. Wrecked off Craignish Point, west of Crinan, on 19 December 1820, the vessel is believed to have split in half…

Did he get away with murder? Tony Clayton came across this rather gruesome entry in the burial registers for St Mary’s Church, Whitechapel, dated 16 May 1827, when Charles William Sheen, alias Beadle, died in the workhouse aged four months. In addition to the entry itself, there was a rather gruesome comment added to the register by the parish clerk: ‘this child’s head was severed from the body by the father William Sheen’. Tony couldn’t resist the challenge of looking into this entry a little deeper, which revealed a tragic story. In January 1827, at the workhouse in Whitechapel, Lydia Beadle gave birth to a child and when this came to the notice of the parochial officers of St Katherine’s, they offered William Sheen, the alleged father, £5 if he…

In this month’s Family Tree Academy, I want to focus on our ancestors’ wills. When I do talks about wills there’s invariably someone in the audience who tells me that their ancestors didn’t leave wills – and I have to say that I used to feel that way myself about my own forebears. With generation after generation of Orcadian crofters on my dad’s side and my mum’s Irish labourers there certainly wasn’t much money around and I didn’t really expect any of them to have had anything worth leaving. This was back in the late 1970s when I was just setting out on my family history journey but once I started digging deeper, extending my research to other branches of the family and to the extended families of aunts, uncles…

Recording and sharing the stories of your family, your community or your organisation can give future generations a window into the past, as well as preserving these memories from fading away as the participants leave us. Many of us have recordings of loved ones stored away in a box somewhere, and these materials are listened to infrequently. Photographs, letters, diaries, birth and death certificates and other documents are all important tools in tracing our genealogy, but they all reflect a moment in time, a static snapshot. An oral history, on the other hand, unfolds over time as you listen to the story being told. How much better it is to hear the actual participant in a story tell his experiences, rather than reading about them. A brief history of sound…

YOUR FAMILY PHOTOS Keith Staley writes: I wonder whether Jayne Shrimpton could offer guidance on this picture. Unfortunately it has been renovated, including being painted over, however it seems to me that the dress the lady is wearing is distinctive enough to aid the dating period. Any help will be appreciated. Jayne Shrimpton replies: As far as I can tell, and regardless of any subsequent restoration, this beautiful portrait is likely to be an original artwork (as opposed to a re-touched, coloured photograph) – probably a hand-crafted painting by a professional portrait painter or trained amateur artist. Unsigned works of art Many thousands of artists of varying abilities were working in the 1800s: they rarely signed their work, but since their subjects generally wore their best quality, most fashionable…

Copied, in the nick of time Here [see right] are images of our family photos. We couldn’t live without our ancestors! I have so many more photos up in the loft, and have been an avid collector for years, making sure all my five aunts left me their collections, and badgering other members for any they have. An ancient aunt showed me a bag full (kept behind the couch!) and I searched through it at home, got my husband to copy all the oldest, and returned it, asking to have them when she didn’t want them anymore. Two days later she threw them all out! She had forgotten what I said. So thank goodness all the v. oldest were copied, including two marriage celebrations, with many relatives who I had…

I’ve so enjoyed the summer of family history programmes on TV, Who Do You Think You Are?, Long Lost Family and the various DNA journeys. Informative, entertaining, and often poignant, stories of other peoples’ origins never fail to bring an empathetic lump to the throat. With the proviso that few of us can manage to fly around the globe to ancestral homelands, accessing rare archives and meeting professional genealogists with our ancestry ready documented and translated, the actual discoveries are vastly entertaining. If I had to pick a favourite, it would be, perhaps surprisingly, Long Lost Family. Trying to work out why, I came to the conclusion that LLF is about very ordinary, often troubled people, rarely any celebrity creeps into it, and the subjects go from having no family…

In the determination to trace members of our own family with a particular surname, it’s easy to overlook the possible importance of people with a different surname that are associated with our ancestors. These individuals crop up in all sorts of settings: in the same house during a census; as witnesses to marriages and legal documents; as people reporting a death; as employees; the masters of apprentices; beneficiaries in a will and so on. These acquaintances, for want of a better word, may be simply unrelated people connected with your family, such as friends, work colleagues and neighbours; but are they more than that? Are they relations? It’s worth investigating them because sometimes they yield valuable, or even surprising, family connections. Occasionally these people are interesting in their own right.…

I’m on a street in Reims, northern France. Capital of the champagne region. And the city where the banns were read in May 1888 for the forthcoming marriage of Catherine Mary Riboldi and Marie Paul André Ruinart de Brimont. And the name of the street? Rue Ruinart de Brimont – yep, seems Catherine’s fiancé’s family have a whole street named after them! Of course, I’m not really here (though it’s on my growing list of places to visit…). But the golden Google Street View man is here, and he’s the next best thing. Street View is just one of the resources that didn’t exist years back when my cousin first began looking for our 2x great-aunt Catherine, and now I can’t imagine family history research without it. Flying the little…