Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2017 i Who Do You Think You Are?

For me this is a bit of a sad ‘welcome’ because I am also saying ‘goodbye’ to Who Do You Think You Are? LIVE (p10). Ten years is a long time and I remember going to the first event when this magazine was just a twinkle in my eye! I will particularly miss meeting readers. I know it won’t be the same, but we have set up a WDYTYA? Magazine Facebook Group where like-minded genealogists can share tips, exchange ideas or ask for advice (p50). It’s like a mini WDYTYA? LIVE – but without the travel. At the point of going to press we had over 370 members after only three days and already queries have been solved. Of course, a Facebook group could never replace our forum which has…

An hour ago I was about to start weighing out for a tray of Auntie Amy’s parkin and it reminded me of your request for stories about inherited recipes in the June issue of WDYTYA? . This recipe is closer to family history (for me) than you might think. It’s written on a 6” x 4” index card – which I used in my early days of family history research to record details – one for each person. This one has become a permanent reminder of the day I obtained the recipe. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I often called round to see Auntie Amy. Chatting about anything and everything, she would show me old photographs and tell me about the people in them. If I was lucky,…

40,317 Durham Diocese marriage bonds and allegations records (1692-1900) are now indexed on familysearch.org, 3,000 hours of work were needed to identify a two-year-old girl found in an unmarked 19th century coffin in San Francisco as Edith Howard Cook, using archives and DNA 371,716 UK military discharge records have been added to ancestry.co.uk, listing those who were born before 1901 and discharged from the armed forces between 1920 and 1971 £487,428 has been given to the University of Surrey to fund research into new technology that will ensure open access to digital archives 4,000 records have been added to the City of London Ironmongers, Apprentices and Freemen collection on findmypast.co.uk…

TAXES  scotlandsplaces.gov.uk ScotlandsPlaces provides free access to 17th and 18th century tax records, as held at the National Records of Scotland. Original document images and transcriptions are available for dog tax records, window tax, hearth tax, farm horse tax and more. Various other resources are also freely accessible on the site. RETOURS  books.google.co.uk Before 1868 Scottish land could not be bequeathed in a will. Instead, a separate ‘services of heirs’ process existed, by which a jury had to confirm an apparent heir’s identity prior to inheritance. Early judgements (called ‘retours’) from 1544-1699 are freely indexed on Google Books at bit.ly/Retours1, bit.ly/Retours2, and bit.ly/Retours3.…

ELECTRIC SCOTLAND electricscotland.com Alastair McIntyre’s Electric Scotland site is packed with resources dealing with Scottish ancestry and history. Its many useful holdings include Francis Groome’s Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland, and thousands of books covering a range of subjects, such as the Scottish worldwide diaspora. AM BAILE  ambaile.org.uk High Life Highland’s bilingual website Am Baile, meaning ‘the village’, has a range of resources relevant to the history and culture of the Scottish Highlands and Islands. As well as many photos, books and documents, there is a newspaper index for several Inverness-shire and north Scotland-based titles. NLS INTERNET ARCHIVE  archive.org/details/nationallibraryofscotland The National Library of Scotland has a dedicated platform on the Internet Archive. Among the collections freely available are published family histories, military lists for the British Army, RAF, and Royal Navy,…

SCOTS LANGUAGE  dsl.ac.uk The Dictionary of the Scots Language is an essential resource to bookmark when using early Scottish documents. Many words in Scots often have different meanings to their English equivalents – a ‘football’, for example, was a monetary payment made to trade incorporations when signing up! PALAEOGRAPHY  www.scottishhandwriting.com The further back in time you go with Scottish documents, the harder they are to read, with various forms of handwriting styles adopted through the centuries, such as the almost impenetrable ‘secretary hand’. The Scottish Handwriting site provides a free tutorial on how to decipher such documents. GOOGLE BOOKS  books.google.co.uk Several Scots Law dictionaries are on Google Books, providing translations for legal terms found in historical documents, from land registration to criminal and civil law, and more. Hugh Barclay’s A…

Some older parish records, especially from the 16th century, are written in Latin, as are some more recent Catholic nonconformist records. And to make matters worse, the names are often abbreviated as well. Latin names from Catholic records can be found here: www.familytreeforum.com/content.php/370-latin-names, including helpful information on how Irish names were translated. The Latin name is usually very similar to the English one, meaning the abbreviations are easy to understand. However, some are confusing:…

• The Pint of History project  www.pint-of-history.wales or www.peint-o-hanes.cymru Explore the project’s discoveries and find out how you can get involved. • Cynefin  cynefin.archiveswales.org.uk The Cynefin project has digitised over 1,200 Welsh tithe maps. • County archive services  discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ find-an-archive County archives are a mine of information, not just about the major online sources, but also more specialised local resources. They can often help with free access to subscription databases. And of course, they have many physical records that aren’t available online. • Welsh Newspapers Online  newspapers.library.wales This handy website can be used search through Welsh newspapers from 1804 all the way up to 1919. The majority of the newspapers available date from the late 19th century to the early 20th century. • Maps  maps.nls.uk Old maps and recent maps are both…

Did my ancestor marry his aunt? Q Why is my ancestor, Sarah Butcher, described as being the wife and aunt of her husband? The baptism of Maria Butcher on the 9 February 1806, records her parents as “John Butcher junior and Sarah his aunt”. Maria’s siblings include George (born 1807), William (born 1810) and Susanna (born 1812), and they also have “John Butcher and Sarah his aunt” listed as their parents. Sarah Butcher was buried, age 55, on 2 July 1821, “the wife and aunt of John Butcher”. Jackie Woodmansee, by email A It was, and is, allowable to marry one’s aunt and I am not sure why attention was brought to this fact in the parish registers. To find the origin of the aunt it was logical to work…

What happened to my great great grandfather? Ann Coles wants to discover what happened to her Australian ancestor following a family tragedy QI would like find out what happened to my great great grandfather, William Rolfe, who married Ruth Birkley in Eastern Hill, Melbourne, in 1853. Ruth had travelled to Australia on the Tippoo Saib from Liverpool, arriving Port Philip Bay in September 1852. Baptised 24 March 1830 at Wallsend, Northumberland, her parents were Thomas and Isabella Birkley. By the 1851 census she is cook to the Hay family in Newcastle. Why did she move to Australia? Her daughter, Elizabeth Rolfe, was born 13 October 1854 in East Melbourne and baptised 14 January 1855 at St Peter’s. Isabella (my great grandmother) was born on 10 March 1857 at Sandy Creek,…

‘Don’t think she is fretting. She isn’t, she is as good as gold. She shall have my very best attention’ When we discover an ancestor who ended up in the workhouse, we tend to see them as victims of a deeply flawed system that has thankfully been consigned to the dustbin of history. However, the nation’s workhouses remained in use for far longer than most people realise, and by the 20th century were not quite the dreaded Dickensian institutions that we often associate with the name. Instead, workhouses evolved and expanded to provide a range of healthcare services, with destitution not necessarily being a pre-requisite for treatment. A fine example can be found in Southwell, Nottinghamshire, where the local workhouse – now owned by the National Trust – also boasted…

British Home Children (britishhomechildren.com) is dedicated to documenting the stories of the 118,000 children who were emigrated to Canada from the late 1860s up to 1948, sent by over 50 organisations including the likes of Barnardo’s and the Salvation Army. This leads you to the research site (canadianbritishhomechildren.weebly.com), which details the history of British home children including records, the ships they sailed on, receiving homes and organisations and the British Home Children Registry (britishhomechildrenregistry.com). There’s also the Library and Archives Canada database at bac-lac. gc.ca/eng/discover/immigration/immigration-records/home-children-1869-1930/Pages/home-children.aspx. Ancestry has 95 million individuals recorded in voter lists (1935-80), plus census material, maritime collections including passenger lists. There’s also the vast Drouin collection (ancestry.co.uk/cs/drouin) – over 25 million French-Canadian and English historical records from 1621-1967. TheShipsList.com has transcribed many records relating to Canadian ships,…

Thomas Cook was born in 1808 in Melbourne, Derbyshire. He left school, around the age of ten, becoming a Baptist missionary in 1828. A strict teetotaller, Thomas, now a cabinet maker, walked from his home in Market Harborough to the nearby town of Leicester to attend a temperance meeting. At the meeting, he suggested that a special train be engaged to carry the Leicester temperance campaigners to a meeting in Loughborough a month later. The first package tour in history was organised for 9 June, when a train was chartered from the Midland Railway Company to take the group of about 500 on the 12-mile journey. He charged the passengers a shilling for the return journey. Thomas immediately saw the potential and became the world’s first tour operator. From there,…

‘A stocking frame could create 1,000 to 1,500 silk loops per minute’ Our ancestors wore knitted stockings and originally all were hand-knitted. Then, in 1589, William Lee of Calverton in Nottinghamshire invented the revolutionary stocking frame. This machine (also called a ‘stocking loom’) made a continuous thread loop around itself to form a kind of netting or lattice-work. A stocking frame could create 1,000 to 1,500 silk loops per minute. The finished fabric could stretch over a limb while still fitting snugly. William failed to earn his fortune, however, as Elizabeth I was worried that his invention would make it harder for hand-knitters to earn their living. He moved to France and set up a factory, but died soon afterwards. His brother, James, took the invention back to England and…

How long have you been doing your family history? I began researching my family history in January 2014, after I got talking about family history at my aunt’s funeral. What had you managed to uncover before hitting your brick wall? First port of call was to ask my father. He explained to me that, around 1900, two brothers had emigrated to Durham from Castlecomer, Ireland. More surprisingly, these two brothers (Brennan) had married two sisters (Mealey). This is where the first headache began. I found Brennan-Mealey marriages but there were three not two! To make things more complicated, all three of the Brennan men appeared on the 1901 census and all of them had originally come from the same parish in Castlecomer. To sort out this mess, I ordered all…

Many researchers may find an unexpected Plymouth connection in their family tree Plymouth is the port where many famous voyages began – from the Golden Hinde, to the Mayflower, the Endurance, HMS Endeavour and the second voyage of HMS Beagle in 1831, which carried Charles Darwin. In 1944, General Omar Bradley and the 1st US Army embarked here for the D-Day landings at Omaha Beach and Utah Beach. And it’s the birthplace of such luminaries as polar explorer Robert Falcon Scott, Victorian newspaper editor William Henry Wills and electrical engineer Jonathan Nash Hearder. But it’s not just the home of the great and good. It’s both a thriving commercial port and one of the Royal Navy’s three operating bases, now known as HMNB Devonport. And as individuals embarking on long…

Britain’s Last Tommies: Final Memories from Soldiers of the 1914-18 War in Their Own Words by Richard Van Emden Pen and Sword, £7.99 Richard Van Emden spent 20 years interviewing over 270 First World War veterans. As well as their memories of the war, he includes his own reflections from getting to know these men – the sad, the funny and the poignant. WRNS: The Women’s Royal Naval Service by Neil R Storey Shirebooks, £7.99 This book focuses on the experiences of the Wrens during both World Wars and the roles they played as cooks, clerks, weapons analysts and air mechanics. It contains deeply moving stories from the women themselves, images of them in action, and photographs of their uniforms and badges. Irish Family History: A Beginners’ Guide by Stuart…

‘Rothay found his position with the Daily Mail increasingly untenable, and he was sidelined by the newspaper’ On an assignment in Munich in October 1923, British journalist Rothay Reynolds decided to seek out a local political firebrand named Adolf Hitler. Although unknown outside of Bavaria, the war veteran was rapidly gaining attention for his fierce verbal attacks on Germany’s elites. “He stared at me straight into the eyes,” Rothay later recalled. “I thought that was a game two could play at, so I stared back. We stared until it became ridiculous and until at last he sat down, and I sat down.” For the rest of their meeting, Hitler barely let his guest speak, ranting about the weakness of the country’s leadership. Rothay was not impressed and left believing his…

CHRIS PATON Chris is a familiar name in Scottish and Irish genealogy via his GENES blog and has a keen eye for online freebies! Enjoy his feature on p16. ED DUTTON Ed is an anthropologist and genealogist based in Finland. His fascination with names has fuelled his own interest in family history. See p23. PROF CLIVE EMSLEY Clive is a renowned expert in the history of British policing. His work at the Open University included the Old Bailey Online project. See p63.…

‘It was a wonderful opportunity to meet, discuss, learn, ask and discover’ WDYTYA? LIVE to close its doors It has been announced that the UK’s largest family history event has come to an end after a ten-year run The popular family history event Who Do You Think You Are? LIVE will close its doors after ten years. Immediate Media, the organisers of the annual event, reached the difficult decision in May due to financial reasons. The UK’s largest family history show celebrated its tenth anniversary in April this year, when over 13,000 family historians and more than 100 specialist exhibitors attended the three-day event at Birmingham NEC. The first show was launched by Brand Events in May 2007 at the Olympia in London. It incorporated The Society of Genealogists Family…

SCOTLANDSPEOPLE  scotlandspeople.gov.uk ScotlandsPeople provides access to civil registration records, parish registers, wills, valuation records, and more. A great deal of free information is available on initial searches and you can pay for scans of the originals. FAMILYSEARCH  familysearch.org FamilySearch hosts two useful Scottish vital records indexes – Scotland Births and Baptisms 1564-1950 and Scotland Marriages 1561-1910. These mainly contain Church of Scotland records prior to 1855 and statutory records from 1856-1874/75. SCOTTISH INDEXES  scottishindexes.com Emma and Graham Maxwell have created Scottish Indexes to provide information from many difficult-to-access record sets held within the National Records of Scotland, including paternity cases and asylum records. The index information is fairly detailed and free and you can pay for the original scans. OLD SCOTTISH GENEALOGY AND FAMILY HISTORY  oldscottish.com/records.html The Old Scottish Genealogy…

STATISTICAL ACCOUNTS  stataccscot.edina.ac.uk/static/statacc/dist/index.html The statistical accounts of Scotland were recorded for each county in the 1790s and 1830s/40s by Church of Scotland parish ministers. They provide detailed gazetteer-style entries, offering a much-needed contemporary canvas on which to paint your ancestors’ stories. They are freely available and searchable on the website and on Google Books. PLACE NAMES  scotlandsplaces.gov.uk/digital-volumes/ ordnance-survey-name-books ScotlandsPlaces’ Ordnance Survey Name Books collection offers information recorded in the mid-19th century from the original creation of the OS mapping project. These not only provide information on the derivation of a place name and some local TOPOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY british-history.ac.uk The British History Online website has a range of free resources of use for Scottish research, including Samuel Lewis’s A Topographical Dictionary of Scotland, first published in 1846. Essentially a gazetteer, it carries…

NRS CATALOGUE  catalogue.nrscotland.gov.uk/nrsonlinecatalogue/ welcome.aspx The National Records of Scotland’s online catalogue is the gateway to thousands of resources which may help with your ancestral research. Many of the archive’s collections are catalogued at item level, meaning you can search by an ancestor’s name or a location. SCAN  catalogue.nrscotland.gov.uk/scancatalogue/ welcome.aspx Many research documents needed for our research still lie in archives. The Scottish Archive Network catalogue is a good starting point to search holdings from over 50 archives across Scotland. The site has not been updated in many years, however, and so local archive websites should also be consulted. GENUKI  genuki.org.uk/big/sct The Scottish page on the UK and Ireland Genealogy platform leads you to dedicated pages on resources available across Scotland, which can be searched thematically or geographically. Many document transcription projects are…

VIRTUAL MITCHELL  mitchelllibrary.org/virtualmitchell/ If your ancestors came from Glasgow, check out the city archive’s Virtual Mitchell website where you can view and download hundreds of historic images of streets, buildings, and images from daily life. You can search by area, street name, or subject. HIGHLANDERS  scottishhighlanderphotoarchive.co.uk The Scottish Highlander Photo Archive carries hundreds of individual and family portrait images from old glass plate and film negatives as taken at the Andrew Paterson Studio of Inverness (1895-1980), which were rescued from destruction in 2001. Searches can be carried out by a person’s name or place name.…

‘Giving a child the mother’s maiden name as a middle name was not uncommon’ Choosing a baby’s name has been taken very seriously by parents for thousands of years and their decision would have been influenced by custom, family ties and the fashions of the time. Understanding naming traditions can help family historians make connections and uncover vital clues. Names can even give you clues to time of birth (Easter, Christmas) and, perhaps, your ancestor’s sense of humour. In March 1659, at St Mary’s in Reading, Nicholas and Elizabeth Day decided to have their child baptised Christmas. Some children were named after their place of birth: for example, Florence Nightingale was so named because she was born in Florence. Ancestor worship Families often used names to honour particular members, so…

Many family historians face the challenge of tracing a mystery man or woman, who pops up in their family tree only to disappear without trace. For WDYTYA? reader Debra Charnley that person was her great grandfather, Thomas Anderton. “Thomas was born in 1874 in Manchester and became a tramcar driver,” Debra explains. “He married Ethel Heaton and they had six children together, born between 1900 and 1912. One child, Ethel, passed away in 1902, but the rest of her siblings all survived into adulthood. “Life carried on as usual for the family until war broke out in 1914. Thomas was aged 39 and almost too old to fight, so he volunteered to join the Royal Army Veterinary Corps (RAVC). As a tramcar driver, he would have had a lot of…

PAUL BLAKE co-wrote Discover Your Roots and is a Fellow of the Society of Genealogists (SoG). KATHERINE s r ctor a COBB pears in 1851 is a member census return of the , but disappears Association after ofthis date Genealogists and Researchers in Archives (AGRA) ALAN STEWART is a family historian with 30 years of genealogy experience and author of Grow Your Own Family Tree. STEVE THOMAS is a genealogist with more than 20 years of experience and regularly appears on TV as an expert. PHIL TOMASELLI is a military family history expert and the author of Tracing Your Air Force Ancestors. ALISON TOPLIS writes on the history of clothing and is an honorary fellow at the University of Wolverhampton. SIMON WILLS is a maritime genealogist and author…

Amanda Holden had French roots thanks to the military career of her 5x great maternal grandfather, Collin Thomas. Collin joined the military during the Peninsular Wars and ended up in Bordeaux where he deserted to marry his French sweetheart, Radegonde. If your ancestor was also in the military you can discover their military history by researching their career. The first place to start is by looking for service records. Prior to the First World War they can be found online via Findmypast (bit.ly/ServiceRecordsFMP). First World War service records can also be found on Ancestry (search.ancestry.co.uk/search/category. aspx?cat=39). However, service records before the late 19th century were only kept for soldiers awarded a pension. This was not the case for Collin who deserted. So we traced his career using an alternative source, muster…

Complaints about pay and pensions were common in the police, though there were perks unavailable in most working class jobs. The Metropolitan Police, and others, provided free medical care. There were also uniforms which meant that a man did not have to pay for his own work clothes. Pay was often below that of semi-skilled working class men, though it was regular and secure; it was not affected by market fluctuations. Yet police officers felt hard done by. They had to contribute to their pensions, and they noted that men in the armed forces did not. Policing was deemed to be a respectable profession, equivalent to that of a semi-skilled or skilled worker. Yet other workers could depend on the additional input of a working wife’s pay for boosting the…

William Willett was born in Surrey in 1856 and lived most of his life in Chiselhurst, Kent. As a young man he joined his father’s building company in Sloane Square, London, where he helped build the firm’s reputation for constructing fine homes in middle-class suburbs. The Times praised him as “an artist who inspired architectural designs always with an eye to internal convenience as well as to the fitness of the exterior for the surroundings.” In later life, William Willett began his campaign to introduce daylight saving. His supporters included Winston Churchill who, as Home Secretary in 1911, predicted that one day statues would be raised in William’s honour and decorated with sunflowers on the longest day of the year. William Willett married twice: firstly to Maria Mills in 1879,…

On the night of 9 June 1817, Jeremiah Brandreth led about 60 rebels armed with guns and makeshift pikes from Pentrich (Derbyshire) towards Nottingham. Jeremiah (1786-1817) was a suspected former Luddite. Born at Sutton-in-Ashfield, Jeremiah worked as a stockinger making ‘Derby ribs’. He married Ann Sutton in 1811 and six years later the family lived in Nottingham. They had two children, with another on the way. Times were hard. Derby ribs were unfashionable and hundreds of people unemployed. Britain’s main manufacturing districts were suffering a trade slump. The working classes couldn’t vote and Parliament was indifferent to their plight. Poverty led several groups to plot rebellion. Jeremiah and his men mistakenly believed they would be joined by uprisings in other counties. Unfortunately for the plotters, their ranks were full of…

GENERAL REGISTER OFFICE The General Register Office (www.gro.gov.uk/gro/ content) oversees civil registration in England and Wales. It holds records of births, marriages and deaths from 1837 as well as later civil partnerships, stillbirths and adoptions after 1927. You need to register to view the index of records and order a copy of a certificate at a cost of £9.25 each. Civil records for Scotland start from 1855 and can be found at scotlandspeople.gov.uk. PERSONAL STORIES Michael was able to break down his brick wall after he talked to his aunt. If you have any older relatives still alive, ask them about their childhoods – they might have met the people you’re trying to trace. WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? FORUM At whodoyouthinkyouare magazine.com/forum, we have an online forum where you…

c1130 Henry, son of William de Tracy, is recorded on a property transfer. Today this document is the oldest to survive in the PWDRO collections. 1575 The keel of Drake’s round-the-world flagship is registered at Plymouth. Originally called the Pelican it is renamed the Golden Hind in honour of a patron’s family crest. 1620 Another world famous vessel, the Mayflower, departs from Plymouth. It carries 102 English pilgrims to New England. Almost half of the company die during the first winter. 1665 Work begins on the Royal Citadel in Plymouth. On the site of an earlier fort, it is situated at the eastern end of Plymouth Hoe overlooking Plymouth Sound. 1691 The Royal Navy establishes a base at Devonport. This will grow into the largest naval base in Western Europe,…

This month’s bonus content includes four directories supplied by My History and Devon Family History Society, together worth £31.95. White’s Directory of Devonshire, 1878-79 The first resource is White’s Directory of Devonshire, 1878-79, worth £12.95. Normally available to download via My History’s sister website, twr computing.co.uk, this fully searchable PDF document lists residents and local tradespeople across Devon towards the end of the 19th century. As with many old directories, the publication also provides detailed background information about each town and village – handy for adding context to your ancestors’ lives. Devonshire Trades Directory, 1930 Also available to download for £9 via twrcomputing.co.uk, this interwar publication lists tradesmen and women across historic county of Devonshire. Entries are sorted by trade within each town, with separate sections for Plymouth and Devonport. Please…

Ian Hislop on Immigration (title TBC) Thursday 22 June BBC Two When French surgeon and revolutionary Simon François Bernard went on trial in London for his part in an 1858 plot to assassinate Napoleon III, few doubted his involvement. Despite this, sensationally, Bernard was acquitted. Why? As Ian Hislop explores in a new documentary on attitudes to immigration in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, we need to see the verdict in the context of an open borders policy few people today realise ever even existed. “Until 1905, anyone, anyone could come to this country with no passport, no visa, no letter of introduction and an absolute right to become British, with the protection of the crown and parliament and everything that goes with it,” Archie Baron, the show’s executive producer,…

£5,000 grants available to digitise archives Company TownsWeb Archiving is inviting applications for grants to fund the digitisation of archives. Following its successful 2016 scheme, the company is offering grants of up to £5,000, an increase from last year’s £4,000 offering. Public, private, business and charity archives based in the UK can apply for the funding, which covers the costs of digitising documents, including books, manuscripts, oversize maps and plans and microfilm, and making collections available online. The deadline is 7 July. To apply, go to townsweb archiving.com/twa-digitisation-grant. TheGenealogist adds First World War records A collection of issues of The Sphere, an illustrated newspaper covering the First World War, have been added to thegenealogist.co.uk. The issues, dating from August 1914 to June 1919, include images of soldiers on the Western Front,…

‘In its heyday, Oldham had more cotton mills than anywhere else in the world’ Oldham’s lost landscape Alan is intrigued by a panorama showing Oldham’s industrial past Arriving in Oldham to talk to the local branch of the Manchester and Lancashire Family History Society, I was very early (no traffic congestion on the motorway) and there was plenty of time for a coffee. The meeting was in Gallery Oldham, an impressive early 21st-century museum, library, art gallery and cultural centre. It has a great cafe, so I bought my espresso macchiato and sat down. For me the highpoint of the cafe (apart from the excellent coffee) was that along the wall behind the counter is a splendid panoramic photograph of the town centre, taken from the south in about 1900…

MONUMENTAL INSCRIPTIONS  memento-mori.co.uk Memento Mori contains free-to-access indexes of monumental inscriptions from Glasgow and central Scotland listing names of the deceased, dates of death and ages when given. Further information requires a payment, but this site will help you to identify when and where ancestors were buried. HIGHLAND BURIALS  sites.google.com/site/highlandmemorialinscriptions/home For the north of Scotland, Highland Memorial Inscriptions has searchable holdings for cemeteries and graveyards in Inverness-shire, Moray and Nairn, Ross and Cromarty, the Western Isles, Sutherland and Caithness. Once you have identified a burial, you can request a photo and details of the full monumental inscription. SAFHS  www.safhs.org.uk The Scottish Association of Family History Societies has two free finding aids on its site. The Burial Grounds database notes where all known Scottish burial grounds exist, if their inscriptions have…

KIRK MINISTERS archive.org If your ancestor was a Church of Scotland minister, a biographical description of his career may be found in the volumes of the Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae. These are freely available on the Internet Archive, and are arranged by synod, the ecclesiastical court jurisdiction, which oversaw presbyteries and kirk sessions. WITCHCRAFT www.shc.ed.ac.uk/Research/witches Was your ancestor a witch or ever bewitched? The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft holds details of almost 4,000 people tried from 1563-1736 for allegedly dabbling in the dark arts, or who appeared as court witnesses. The cases are sourced from contemporary records including kirk session registers and court papers. MILITARY RESEARCH  scottishmilitaryresearch.co.uk The Scottish Military Research Group is a charitable organisation set up to educate and inform the public about how to research their Scottish military…

PERTH  www.culturepk.org.uk/archive-local-family-history/searchable-databases The Friends of Perth and Kinross Archives have indexed many records collections, which have been presented in free-to-access databases. Among the collections are Perth burial records from 1794-1855, militia collections, Jacobite resources, and the Perthshire People and Kinross-shire Kin. DUNDEE  fdca.org.uk If your ancestors came from further along the River Tay, check out the Friends of Dundee City Archives platform. Church records, burial records, burgh registers, trade directories, school records, Poor Law registers and more have been transcribed and made freely available. DUNFERMLINE  info.dumgal.gov.uk/HistoricalIndexes The website of the Friends of the Archives of Dumfries and Galloway has a range of record indexes from the burghs of Dumfries, Lockerbie, and Moffat which are free to search, as well as kirk session and presbytery records from Dumfries, shipping records and…

NLS NEWSPAPERS  auth.nls.uk/eresources If you reside in Scotland, registering on the National Library of Scotland’s (NLS) e-resources collections can provide access to several newspaper resources – the Scotsman, The Times and the British Library 19th Century Newspaper Collection (providing access to the Glasgow Herald, the Caledonian Mercury, the Dundee Courier, and the Aberdeen Journal). GOOGLE NEWS news.google.co.uk/newspapers The Glasgow Herald from 1806-1990, the Evening Times from 1953-1990, and the Glasgow Advertiser from 1783-1801 are free to access on Google News. The Bulletin and Scots Pictorial from 1951-1960 is also available, but trickier to access – the easiest way to do so is via bit.ly/BulletinPaper. EDINBURGH GAZETTE www.thegazette.co.uk In 1699, the Edinburgh Gazette was conceived as the official paper of record for Scotland. Appearing irregularly up to 1793, it has appeared…

Genealogists tracing Scottish lines can have a hard time. Civil records don’t start until 1855 and survival rates for baptism, marriage and burial records are patchy before 1700 (visit scotlandspeople.gov.uk to discover what is available online). But there is one ray of light. Until the late 19th century, many Scots followed naming rules, making it possible to make reasonable inferences. The first son was named after the father’s father (sometimes mother’s father); the second after the mother’s father (or father’s father), the third after the father, the fourth after the father’s oldest brother (or paternal grandfather) and the fifth after the mother’s oldest brother (or mother’s paternal grandfather). Daughters followed a similar pattern with the first being named after the mother’s mother, the second named after the father’s mother and…

This lively couple were first noticed in reference to a case of selling beer after hours, at the Wooden House Inn (a beer-house) in Llanbadarn Fawr, just outside Aberystwyth, in 1870. Further digging in the newspapers found a number of other references to them, at the Wooden House (and under the Welsh name, Tycoed) and also at the Swan Inn (or White Swan Inn) in Aberystwyth. Their married life was not a peaceful one. Catherine was a widow with seven children when she married Thomas. The court reports of drunken customers and selling outside licensing hours are interspersed with complaints of him assaulting her and using abusive language and her assaulting him (bound over for six months and fined £5). He seems to have left her and come back regularly.…

FRENCH NEWSPAPERS French announcements of events such as burials can contain useful detail. Departmental archives often have online copies of local newspapers or try Gallica (gallica.bnf.fr), which has English translation tools. GRO CONSULAR RECORDS If you are searching for a British national who may have married or died overseas, try these records. They are available to view at findmypast.co.uk HÔTEL DE VILLE In France, birth, marriage and death registers are usually held at the local town hall. Debra found that the staff in Grand Quevilly (grandquevilly.fr) were happy to search for free and to send copies of original documents.…

Dating a 1900ish Sunday school outing group photo bit.ly/2qSKSXN I believe this was taken around 1900, probably in Kent. It won’t be possible to work out the location, but any help dating it more precisely? You wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of the two older ladies in the front row would you? GClark40 Finding siblings bit.ly/2pW60yA My great grandfather was James Walker, born in Auchtermuchty in July 1855. His parents were John Walker and Janet Bullions, married in Moneydie, Perthshire, in 1852. James’ younger brother Leonard was born in 1857. John died in 1857. I found James and Leonard in the 1861 census. James (aged five) is listed underneath an Alexander Walker, who is aged seven. Slightly higher up the list is an Andrew Walker, aged eight,…

“Kenneth R Marks’ site The Ancestor Hunt (theancestorhunt.com /blog/canada-onlinehistorical-newspaper-links) has a very comprehensive list of Canadian online historical newspapers. Each province (Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Prince Edward Island and Saskatchewan) has its own page of links to all the online resources that Kenneth has found in his exhaustive search. The Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and Yukon share a page of links. To take Alberta as an example… clicking the link leads to the likes of the Alberta Heritage Digitisation Project (ourfutureourpast.ca/newspapr) and the University of Alberta’s Peel’s Prairie Provinces (peel.library.ualberta.ca/newspapers/ADN), containing over 66,000 newspaper issues – that’s around 4.8 million articles! The pace of digitisation of these sources has been rather slow in places, so not all Canadian titles and areas are represented. However, Kenneth has…

Ship’s name The header on the first page of the manifest gives additional information on the vessel and the voyage. Ship’s details Vessel’s name and shipping line; ports of departure and destination. Passengers Passengers’ names. Addresses Last address in the UK. Class First, second or third. Final port Port at which passengers have contracted to disembark. Many have disembarked at ports in continental Europe, long before the final destination in Australia. Profession Profession or occupation. Personal info Sex and age. Country Country of last permanent residence. New country Country of intended future permanent residence. Nearly all intended to return to England.…

CONTACTS • The National Archives Bessant Drive, Kew TW9 4DU www.nationalarchives.gov.uk • Royal Geographical Society 1 Kensington Gore, Kensington, London SW7 2AR www.rgs.org WEBSITES • Ancestry www.ancestry.co.uk • Findmypast www.findmypast.co.uk • TheGenealogist www.thegenealogist.co.uk BOOKS • P&O: A History by Ruth Artmonsky, (Shire, 2012) • The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century by Jeremy Black (History Press, 2003) • The British Seaside Holiday by Kathryn Ferry, (Shire History, 2009) • Ancestors on the Move: A History of Overseas Travel by Keen Foy (History Press, 2014) • The Passport: The History of Man’s Most Travelled Document by Martin Lloyd (Sutton, 2003) • Victorians and Edwardians Abroad: The Beginning of the Modern Holiday by Neil Matthews (Pen & Sword, 2016)…

Second page The first page details the annual size of the pension and the second page gives a description of the pensioner. Date of joining Date of joining the Metropolitan Police Force. Some police officers may have served elsewhere previously. Length of service Officers had to serve for 25 years to be eligible for a pension, but there was little incentive to continue beyond that. Remuneration Compare the salary of your kin to other officers or those in other professions. Pensioner and wife Descriptions of the pensioner and his wife are given as the claimant’s pension would go to his wife on his death. Place and date of birth The precise details about place and date of birth can be useful for tracing the correct birth certificate. Marriage details If…

MUSEUMS AND ARCHIVES • The British Newspaper Archive  britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk Local and national papers are full of articles and letters documenting the way in which our ancestors’ lives were affected by the standardisation of time and daylight saving. Read them online here, or at findmypast.co.uk, or on microfilm at public libraries. • Frenchay Village Museum 1 Begbrook Park, Winterbourne, Bristol BS16 1SZ frenchaymuseumarchives.co.uk It’s worth checking out your local history museum for records, diaries and oral histories that reveal how Britain’s changing times affected local communities. Frenchay’s digitised school logs, for example, record that poor attendances followed daylight saving in 1916. • The Clockmakers’ Museum Science Museum, Exhibition Road, London SW7 2DD sciencemuseum.org.uk/visitmuseum/Plan_your_visit/exhibitions/clockmakersmuseum The history of watch and clock-making in London is traced through the world’s oldest collection – from 1600…

• The Guildhall Library (London Metropolitan Archives) bit.ly/frameworkGL Holds the records of the Worshipful Company of Framework Knitters 1657–2002. • The National Archives discovery.nationalarchives. gov.uk Find individuals or firms in the hosiery trade using Discovery. • Glasgow City Archives bit.ly/GlasgowFH Home to the records of the city’s Framework Knitters and Stocking-makers 1756-1904. • Barrow Heritage Group bit.ly/BarrowHG Explore the history of framework knitting and other industries in Barrow-upon-Soar. • Framework Knitters’ Museum  frameworkknittersmuseum.org.uk A working textile and living history museum. • Knitting Together knittingtogether.org.uk History and heritage of the East Midlands knitting industry with biographies, timelines and a virtual museum. • Nottinghamshire Heritage Gateway bit.ly/NottinghamHG Provides information on living conditions and wages, plus a gateway to archival sources. • Leicestershire Industrial Society bit.ly/frameworkknits The society explores the county’s…

Aviator Amelia Earhart disappeared on a daring mission in 1937 in what became one of the great mysteries of the 20th century. Your forebears read about the increasingly desperate search for her with growing disappointment, as if she was someone they knew in person. Earhart’s last great flight was to circumnavigate the world accompanied by a navigator, Captain Fred Noonan. They took off from Miami in Florida on 1 June in a Lockheed Electra which was described as the ‘flying laboratory’ because of its array of up-to-date apparatus. Earhart arrived in Calcutta on 17 June, having covered more than half her journey, flying at an average of 900 miles a day. On 28 June she was at Port Darwin, Australia. On the last fateful section of the journey she left…

The Husband Hunters by Anne de Courcy Orion Publishing, 320 pages £20 This book is by the same author as The Fishing Fleet and the question is: “Why would young American women come to Britain to marry?” Between 1870 and 1914, 454 American girls married titled Europeans. The author points out the wish on one hand of the mothers of the American girls to improve their position in American society. On the other hand, the European (and in particular British) aristocracy were suffering the effects of the Depression in the 1870s and desperately needed funds to get their estates in order. The book provides the background and then gives details of a number of heiresses, their backgrounds and their subsequent marriages to British aristocrats and the effect this had on…

Poldark June BBC ONE Continuing to mine the much-loved novels of Winston Graham, Auntie’s blockbuster of life in Cornwall in the late 18th century is back for a third series. Naturally, this means the return of familiar characters such as Ross (Aidan Turner) and Demelza (Eleanor Tomlinson), but we’re also promised new faces. These include Elizabeth’s cousin, Morwenna, (Ellise Chappell), who takes a job as a governess from George Warleggan in order to support her sisters and widowed mother. We also meet Demelza’s brothers: while religious Sam (Tom York) is a Methodist proselytiser like his father, Drake (Harry Richardson) is a good-natured free spirit who doesn’t want to settle for his allotted place in life. Making History June RADIO 4 The long-running history magazine show returns for a new series.…

LONDON Tracing Your Italian Ancestry 15 July SOCIETY OF GENEALOGISTS sog.org.uk/books-courses/  events-courses 0207 553 3290 Author and genealogist Lynn Serafinn will take you through the basics of tracing your Italian ancestry in just three hours. The course will mainly focus on parish records. £20 for the afternoon. SOUTH-EAST The Enumerator Strikes Back 13 June BOURNE END COMMUNITY CENTRE, HIGH WYCOMBE bucksfhs.org.uk/index.php/  events David Annal, a family history specialist, discusses the role census enumerators have played since 1841 when censuses were first transcribed into census enumerators’ books. Donations are welcome. The Orange Lilies – Brighton and Hove in the Somme 30 June JUBILEE LIBRARY, BRIGHTON www.culture24.org.uk/  am533065?id=EVENT561056 strikealight@rocketmail.com 0772 700 6538 Drop in First World War day, marking the end of the Somme. The day includes speakers, film showings, and a…

Strict Baptists Sophie Raworth’s story focused on her nonconformist forebears who migrated to the US at the end of the 18th century to practise their faith without persecution. If your ancestors were also nonconformists then try searching for their records online. 1 If your ancestors were Baptists then try finding information for them on the Strict Baptist Historical Society website (sbhs.org.uk), which has a database that can be searched for free by clicking on the option for ‘Personal Names Database’. 2 The next page gives information about the database. The database is an index for entries in The Strict Baptist Magazine and you’ll need to contact the society to view the article. The index can be searched at the bottom of the page, so enter the name of your ancestor…