Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2024 i Family Tree UK

I am absolutely guilty of hurtling through each day, dotting multiple tasks on multiple to-do lists, and wishing, and wishing, I had more time. But, in amongst all this hurly-burly, in the past few months my family history has become a bit of an oasis of calm… nice! Rather than trying to accomplish 101 things before breakfast, instead I am just concentrating on one family history point at a time… focussing on it, enjoying it, turning it over in my mind and seeing what more I can uncover, slowly and carefully chipping away. And it feels as though it’s time very well (and peacefully) spent. It’s not an approach that will see a dizzying number of new ancestors added to my tree, but the benefits, in terms of research riches and…

Civil registration records are normally the first records that we encounter when we start researching our family history, and they provide us with the fundamental ‘building blocks’ for our research. However, sometimes we might encounter a birth, marriage or death record that cannot be explained and this month we take a look at some rather unusual marriage records. Angela Wilson discovered two separate marriage entries, nine years apart, for her grandparents, and wants to know: ‘Why were there two marriage entries?’ The first marriage took place on 22 April 1920 at St George’s parish church, Bloomsbury, between John Sherard Osborn and Mollie Lucy Long. At the time that this marriage took place, Angela’s grandfather was using the name of John Sherard Osborn, which is a key fact (as we shall…

I shall never forget the day when I felt my grandfather stay my hand. We were sorting the shed after our parents’ deaths. My brother-in-law was tipping nails from an old paint pot into a box to go to the tip for recycling. I was not close by but could see and hear him tipping the nails out. It was a hot day. As I shaded my eyes, something shiny caught the sun in amongst the falling rusty nails. What was that? I went over and reached into the box. It was my grandfather’s World War I Royal Engineers shoulder badge, then another, and there were his brass uniform buttons! What treasure! ‘Don’t be throwing that out,’ I seemed to hear him say, in that heavenly ray of sunshine. Forever…

The Alderson FHS held its first AGM at Walworth Castle in County Durham in 1984. Now, 40 years later, we are still going strong and will be having our anniversary AGM back at Walworth over the weekend of 6, 7 and 8 September 2024. How was the society established? The Society was formed by Geraldine Alderson, the daughter of one of three dedicated men who had independently carried out their own one name study over several years. After her father, Basil, died Geraldine realised the best way of perpetuating his memory and work was to form a group of similar enthusiasts. The collections of Gerry Morgan and Oswald Alderson were merged with Basil’s and thus the Society started, Gerry and Oswald also being founder members. Our evergreen founder member Over…

❏ 1 Start growing a free online tree (eg at www.familysearch.org www.ancestry.co.uk www.findmypast.co.uk www.myheritage.com or www.treeview.co.uk) ❏ 2 Begin with yourself & work backwards through the generations, so that you ensure that each new piece of information is built on sound foundations ❏ 3 Add names, dates, and other biographical details (be sure to set each person in your tree as ‘living’ or ‘deceased’ accordingly). It’s important to set living people as ‘living’ so that the online trees will keep the information you write about them private ❏ 4 Include photos and stories you know about your family. Ask family members for further information. (Only upload material for which you have the permission of the owner to share online) ❏ 5 Search the online websites (eg as mentioned above) for information about…

The book is written by historian Sarah Wise and is about the devasting consequences of the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act and the impact it had on a generation of people, many of whom were children who were forcibly taken from their families and locked away simply for being different and, of course, all were very poor. Sarah is a published author of several books including Inconvenient People and the Blackest Streets in which she looks at the case histories found with the Victorian asylums and the lives of those within the London slums. For the Undesirables she has left the Victorian period only to discover that the surviving records of the first half of the 20th century are as bleak as that of the 19th. The book is split into…

We recently switched broadband suppliers, and now, instead of our familiar landline, we have a Digital Voice. Useless in a power cut, but if there’s a crisis and we can’t find our mobile phones in a hurry, at least we’ll be able phone our phones to find them, a regular occurrence in our house. We’ve come a long way since my husband’s elderly parents sat by their newly installed telephone for two days in the late sixties, waiting for it to ring to say it was working. I was intrigued by Voice. I’d been turning the word over in my head for some time, considering how many means of personal communication we have in 2024. Not only phones, but email, text messaging and many versions of video calling, all with…

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Barbara Roberts discovered an interesting entry in the 1911 Census for Richard and Elizabeth Cooke. The census also shows their daughter Elizabeth Kirby, Elizabeth’s husband William Kirby, plus James Johnson, a 7-year-old ‘nurse child’. There is also an entry for ‘Elizabeth Kirby, granddaughter, 3 weeks’, which is written in a separate hand. The glaring transcription error concerns ‘Lilian Elizabeth Kirby’ – this child did not exist. A closer look at the census form shows that what is actually written on the fifth line is ‘Infant daughter of William & Elizabeth Kirby, granddaughter, under one month’, but this has been crossed out and the name of Elizabeth, the 3-week-old granddaughter, substituted at the bottom. A great example of how a growing family can grow a little more thanks to an error…

The potential of newspapers as a source for family history research is enormous. And thanks to a digitisation project begun in 2011 by Findmypast in partnership with the British Library, our access to British newspapers is better than it has ever been before. At the time of writing, almost 75 million pages of newsprint have been scanned with nearly a quarter of a million of those added in the past seven days, according to the website of the British Newspaper Archive. The database is one of the biggest that you’ll use in the course of your family history research and it can reveal facts and stories about your ancestors that you would almost certainly never have discovered otherwise. But we need to start with a word of caution. The database…

SUBSCRIPTION FORM FOR UK SUBSCRIBERS, please return your completed form to our simple freepost address: Family Tree subscriptions, FREEPOST: WARNERS GROUP (FTRE) FOR EUROPE & THE REST OF THE WORLD, please return your form to: Family Tree subscriptions, Warners Group Publications Plc, The Maltings, West Street, Bourne, Lincolnshire, PE10 9PH, UK Learn with every issue Family Tree was first published in 1984, and since then we’ve been your friendly, approachable guide to genealogy. We’re here to help you learn and take your research further. The DNA experts Understanding DNA test results and how they relate to your family tree can be really challenging. That’s why we include an expert DNA guide every month. Your questions answered Our popular Q&A section of the magazine is your chance to quiz our experts…

THERE IS MORE TO THE IMPACT ON PEOPLE THAN JUST DISEASE When examining occasions with large numbers of deaths that occurred centuries ago, can we confidently conclude they were due to natural causes such as epidemics (of which plague was one) or to some other type of event? Plague, of course, has been recognised as being one of the most devasting causes of mass deaths of people. The Black Death alone, introduced to Europe in 1346, is thought to have killed at least a third of the population (25-30 million people). Many regions recorded deaths as directly due to the plague but there may have been other, environment-related conditions present that were the primary causes of destitution, famine and ultimately death. During the decades of plague epidemics in Europe it…

Your family photos Ann Lyons writes: Please could I have some help with photo analysis. The first photo shows my grandparents John and Ellen, with (I believe) their eldest six children: Hannah b.1890; Mary Bridget (Dot) b.1892; James b.1894; Susan b.1895; Ellen b.1896; and baby Eugene b.1898. They had another son in 1899, then five daughters followed by two boys, another girl and finally a boy in 1911. The photo was taken in Cork, Ireland, and I have not seen the reverse. Can you please date the second photo and estimate the possible ages of the children so that they can be correctly identified? I am told the children are my father’s siblings: Monica, Mary Bridget and Eugene (the baby in the first image). However, this cannot be right as…

Ancestry Pro Tools: what are they? how can they help you? Launched in the USA late last year, Ancestry Pro Tools are now available in Canada, Australia and the UK and require an active Ancestry family history membership and an additional payment in order to use them. Pro Tools provide ‘advanced DNA and family history tools’. Most notable to AncestryDNA researchers will be the ‘Enhanced shared matches’. This allows you to see how much DNA your matches share with one another. This is a feature already offered by MyHeritageDNA to its DNA customers and now Ancestry DNA users will reap the benefits of this additional information for their research too. Karen Evans, Family Tree DNA advisor, reports that this new Ancestry Pro Tool is ‘super exciting with the enhanced shared…

In the family history world, DNA has become a major part of tracing ancestors and linking living relatives. I well remember an early conference on the subject, organised by the Guild of One Name Studies held in Oxford, about 2005. One very elderly gentleman (I am elderly now but he seemed very old to me then) raised his hand. In horrified tones, he asked, ‘You are not digging people up, are you?’. We laughed and assured him that, no, we were just comparing the DNA of the living to find the links to our deceased ancestors. On the other hand, archaeologists dig up the remains of people all the time and have done for centuries. In general, no one could say much about them except what the shapes and damage…

I ’ve spent the day buried, appropriately enough, in a stash of French death entries. The plan was to take Catherine Mary’s five adoptive cousins – Henri, Lucie, André, Sophie and Edith Ruinart de Brimont – and use the civil registration entries at Ancestry to find as many of their births, marriages and deaths as I can. But it may not be plain sailing, as I’ve already noticed the name that shows up in Ancestry’s search results isn’t necessarily the subject of the BMD entry itself. Oh no, nothing so predictable. Instead, it looks like people are sometimes listed under their father’s name, their husband’s, even their child’s, so it’ll mean scrolling and scrolling, and checking every record that looks vaguely likely. All adds to the fun! Now, with every…

If I had to choose my favourite tool in DNA research it would have to be clustering. Yes, trees are super helpful and hints are great, but clustering is a powerful tool that allows you to unlock your DNA match list. You know the saying ‘Birds of a feather flock together’? Well in DNA terms, matches from a line cluster and entwine! So what is clustering, how do you do it and how does it help? The (sort of) science behind clustering Clustering or grouping works through shared DNA. We inherited our DNA from our parents who, in turn, inherited theirs from their own parents. Although we get 50% from Dad and 50% from Mom, there is no rule that says the 50% we get from a parent is an…

You never know what you’re going to find when you open a new message on Ancestry. Last year, when I spotted a notification from legal historian Charlotte Coleman, I could not have imagined what I was about to discover. Astonishingly, one of my Welsh relatives (my 1st cousin 3x removed) was a pioneer in the history of law, among the first women barristers in England and Wales. On further investigation, I found she was also a trailblazer in education and medicine. She lived an extraordinary life, filled with family tragedy, academic excellence, and – eventually – a long marriage in a stately home full of pets, including a Great Dane named Peter. She lived an extraordinary life, filled with family tragedy, academic excellence… and a long marriage in a stately…

This column explains all the recognised methods of dating old family photographs, and we now scrutinise our ancestors’ appearance as they posed before the camera. Clothes, accessories and hairstyles are key stylistic details that, when correctly identified, provide an accurate time frame for all portrait photographs. Focusing on female modes, this month we continue with headwear – an important element of Victorian and Edwardian dress and a major picture dating tool. Fashionable bonnets, hats and caps frequently changed their shape, fabric and ornamentation and were items that could be relatively easily and cheaply updated. Here we examine how to date headwear styles from the 1890s and early 1900s. • Suitable headwear was essential for respectability when out in public, and often female ancestors wore a hat or cap in the…

What if I can’t get to the archive? As family historians we often find that some of our lines of research meet problems within a generation or two of the start of civil registration: either our ancestors disappear from the parish registers or, conversely, they are so numerous we cannot be sure which one is actually our direct ancestor. Fortunately from advice given in FT magazine we know what to do: search for alternative sources of information, such as school records, removal orders, settlement certificates, bastardy orders, monumental inscriptions, court records, muster rolls, hearth and window tax returns and all the way back to manorial rolls. The problem The difficulty is that many of these records exist in a single copy, in a single archive. They have not been digitised.…

Study club August meeting - Royal family trees ‘Royal family trees: succession and scandal’ with Steve Roberts Mon 12th August 6.30pm September meeting - Tracing my merchant mariner ancestor with Keith Gregson Mon 16th September 6.30pm October meeting - Chancery records with Sarah Pettyfer Mon 14th October 6.30pm DNA club August webinar - DNA tree know-how ‘Getting your tree ready for DNA: suitable for new test takers and for those who are wondering why they’re not getting on as well as they’d like’ with Karen Evans September webinar - DNA correspondence skills Make it easier for your DNA match. We have tips and tricks to share with Michelle Leonard Wed 18th September 12.30pm October webinar - Y-DNA with John Cleary Wed 16th October 12.30pm Genealogy Gadgets club August webinar -…