Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2024 i Family Tree UK

In this article I’ll be demystifying the recent upgrades and explaining how these tests can help you. FamilyTreeDNA is the only company with a large matching database of Y and MT test results and therefore there isn’t the same concept of uploading your DNA to other databases – they have a worldwide database and the vast majority of results are already there. Y and MT tests provide unique access to information about your ancestors that you don’t get from the likes of Ancestry or MyHeritage who solely provide autosomal DNA tests. People have a number of different questions that they may want to answer with a DNA test. One person could be an adoptee trying to find their birth family, another may be trying to discover the unknown father of…

As we study our ancestors, putting ‘flesh on the bones’, we sometimes find that a group of them come from or relate to a particular community. Sometimes an ancestor was closely associated with a particular organisation, perhaps a church, society or institution. Sometimes we look closely at people in a place in an attempt to break down a brick wall. Sometimes a house has been in the family for a long time – in my case 90 years. We gather information about the wider place and the people associated with it, and a one-place study is born. Whilst this often focusses on a parish, town or village, it can be a street or an individual building. That building need not be a house: there are one-place studies covering churches, workplaces,…

Where did your ancestors come from? The question is important, since it determines where you will find the evidence needed to compile your family tree. Most sources of evidence, such as the census, and parish registers, are arranged by place. Place also had an defining influence on ancestors’ lives. It played an important role in determining who their neighbours were, who their landlords were, and what work they did. The local history of the areas where your ancestors lived necessarily involved them, since they were local people. They shared and helped to shape the history of their rural parish, their market town, or their great city. We family historians need to be able to place our ancestors in the context of the area where they lived. How do we do…

‘Rural Essex church brings family history firmly into the 21st century with cutting edge digital mapping software’ Utilising a Pegasus backpack (one of only two in the whole UK) the churchyard of St Mary’s Church in Woodham Ferrers, is being GPS mapped. Experts in burial mapping, AG Intl, are surveying the location of every memorial both within the church and in the churchyard. “The results of this survey will be added to photographs of each memorial in situ,” explain ESFH, “with scanned images of the corresponding burial register from the Essex Record Office – dating back some 500 years – to create a state of the art interactive map that sets out every gravestone to scale and allows users to zoom in and out, discovering information and images relating to…

When researching our family history, we often overlook the properties within which our ancestors lived, and yet these provided the very security for a household to survive on a daily basis. Across the centuries, many houses have borne witness to endless family stories, and, as such, tracing the story of an ancestral home can be an equally fascinating pursuit to that of the family itself. The genealogical timeline of addresses Starting with the basic genealogical records, we can build up a sense of how long a family may have been present at a particular address. Civil registration records for births, marriages and deaths in England and Wales from July 1837, and in Scotland from January 1855, will usually note an address at which an event occurred. However, these can be…

So, Marie Paul André Ruinart de Brimont, my 2x greataunt’s husband, is now a Vicomte and head of the champagne house Ruinart Père et Fils. Which makes Catherine Mary – born into desperate poverty in the east end of London – a Vicomtesse. Vicomtesse Charlotte, to be precise, as her adoptive French family knew her. Honestly, it’s all so Cinderella, I have to pinch myself sometimes. But before I start to look into Cinders and her Prince Charming’s lives in France, I’d like to learn a little about the family champagne business in Reims. Surprisingly, there’s quite a bit of information online, which I piece together with a history direct from Ruinart Père et Fils, and an article sent by Family Tree reader Alan Whytock. Alan worked as a wine…

One of the first rules of family history research is that you should always seek out the box in the attic. You know the one: that collection of miscellaneous bits and pieces in the old tin box that you ‘inherited’ when you and your siblings were clearing out your parents’ house. The one with all those documents that were once important to your grandparents; the letter of reference given to your granddad when he left the army; your granny’s rent book from the house they lived in before the war and an old school certificate awarded to a great aunt in 1923. Each of them adds something to the story, however seemingly insignificant it might be. And if you’re really lucky you’ll find a couple of birth or marriage certificates…

Q Several of us have been trying to uncover the origins of William Hammond (c1756-1808), miller of Marden in Kent and of his wife, Mary (c1759/60-1847). She is in the 1841 Census given as not born in Kent. They are known to have had the following issue: Mary Georgiana bpt. 6-11-1793 in Marden; died 13-11-1870, aged 77; Lucy bpt. 12-8-1795 in Marden; buried 6-4-1838, aged 42; William Cooper bpt. 29-1-1797/98; died 27-4-1861 in Marden; and Charles b.c. 1804 in Marden; alive in 1808, mentioned in his father’s will, and probably died in 1888 in Maidstone, Kent. My daughter is descended from Lucy. Several of Mary’s children baptised their children in the Independent (Congregationalist) Chapel in Marden, rather than the Anglican church. Mary’s age at marriage If Mary was born around…

Your family photos John Tyler writes Please can you help me accurately date these two images. The portrait (photographer’s studio unknown) is of my great grandmother, Emily Pengelly of Looe in Cornwall (b.1867), who looks about 30 years of age to me. She owned a draper’s shop (second image: the window dresser needs help I think!) but we don’t know exactly from when. Trade Directories suggest it was post-1889 and her first defined entry is in 1897, so I wonder if the women’s clothes might help narrow the date. We don’t know the identity of the two ladies outside the draper’s shop, but I assume them to be staff wearing almost a uniform. I have always assumed that both photos might date to the early 1890s but your guidance would…

We need a standard for tree sharing! Phil Isherwood’s article (‘Sources, Evidence & Proof: What is proof?’ FT November 2023) about genealogical ‘proof ’ and the Board of Certification for Genealogists’ (BCG) Genealogical Proof Standard raises a huge issue that has been bothering me ever since I started this wonderful, confusing and sometimes frustrating hobby. While Phil concluded that the BCG’s Standard is best practice and useful for us all to follow (hear hear), he also identified some of its drawbacks, one of which was that ‘it isn’t possible to use it to assess the principal form of communication in modern family history – the online tree’. And this is the rub, I think. Let me come clean. I’ve been researching my family for over 10 years and have two…

Well, Glory be! At last, one of my irreverent children has admired the family tree and expressed a desire to learn more of her family history. ‘Not the distant cousins and all that lot,’ she said briskly, seeing the familiar glint appear in my eye, but spotting a rather glamorous colourised and repaired photo of her 4x great-grandmother Maria Bryant, born 1807. Daughter has recently become a grandma, which has clearly awakened some Wordsworthian ‘Intimations of Mortality’, and which awesomely makes Ida, the smallest twiglet, Maria’s 6x great-grandchild. My earliest 6x great-grandmother was born in 1693! Which, if we’re playing with numbers as I love to do, makes Elizabeth Oldfield Ida’s 9x ancestor. Wow! Do read that poem if you haven’t, and read it again if you have, probably long…

When parliament legislated for elementary education for all, responsibility was devolved to hard-working people on local councils. It was a huge undertaking, but the efforts of those Victorians endure to this day. Why this story? My interest in how schools were set up after the 1870 Act was piqued on discovering that two of my great-grandfather’s sisters (Elizabeth and Louisa Haliday) had both been headmistresses at board schools in Huddersfield. Both were born in Wakefield in the 1850s but the family moved to Manchester while the girls were young. It was a chance discovery in the Huddersfield Daily Chronicle via the British Newspaper Archive that alerted me to Elizabeth being appointed as mistress at Moldgreen School in 1874 at an annual salary of £100, having transferred from St Luke’s Infants’…

On a frosty winter morning, there is an unparalleled pleasure in embarking on a tranquil stroll through the peaceful ambiance of my local graveyard in Suffolk. This sanctuary provides a serene and quiet retreat away from the bustling town centre. This graveyard, however, is not your typical final resting place. It lacks the familiar gravestones inscribed with heartfelt messages for dearly departed relatives from generations past. There are no stones to honour the lives lost, nor are there flowers to signify their enduring memory. A solitary cross, not extravagant but rather humble in its appearance, stands as a beacon of remembrance. This cross is adorned with modest metal emblems, each small enough for a palm. These emblems were collected and affixed to the cross, each one a silent testament to…

At last I have the new look Ancestry match page in Beta! If I’m totally honest I had been checking multiple times a day when I’d seen other people mentioning it on social media, and I was very excited when it appeared. So what has changed? I’m going to be going through what I’ve found and the possible implications for users. Remember it’s in Beta so things can (and probably will) change as Ancestry receive feedback and tweak any bugs. Shown below are the top matches for my mother before the new look (Figure 1) and with Beta (Figure 2). Finding your way around You can see some of the visuals have changed, but two things very quickly jumped out at me – the filter bar and the links I…