Innholdsfortegnelse for Jan-23 i Who Do You Think You Are?

This morning, I accompanied a friend to register the death of her husband. It was a sad and solemn business, and made me think again about all of the death certificates I have ordered in the past for my research. Family history is a fascinating and fulfilling hobby, but I hope that I never lose sight of the humanity behind the people whose lives I explore. All of those deaths registered by someone grieving a loss. But family history also helps us to see the bigger picture, what we inherit and what we pass on in the great chain of life. This month we’ve got lots of advice and avenues to explore that will encourage us all to honour those who went before us. It may seem as if family…

Email wdytyaeditorial@ourmedia.co.uk to feature your event here for free PICK OF THE MONTH Learn how some ‘traitors’ changed the world for the better TREASON: PEOPLE, POWER & PLOT Until 6 April a The National Archives, London w nationalarchives.gov.uk/treason This new exhibition from The National Archives (TNA) will explore how the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, the establishment of the Church of England, the birth of the USA and the extension of UK voting rights are all connected to acts of treason. Using documents from TNA's collections, it tells the stories of both well-known alleged traitors such as Guy Fawkes and Anne Boleyn, and lesser-known figures such as Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester, who was accused of treason and necromancy in the 15th century, and John Frost, one of the leaders…

Forces War Records forces-war-records.co.uk Expect updates, features and a "vast increase’’ to the number of records in the first part of 2023. Irish Great War Dead Archive irelandsgreatwardead.ie This database has been online since 2021, and creator Tom Burnell says he is working on "grey area” entries - individuals who should be included but do not already quaiify, such as Mercantile Marine sailors killed while not on war work, Air Fleet Auxiliary and army-canteen staff. Royal Logistic Corps royallogisticcorps.co.uk/museum/archives A new website is set to go live in 2023. Highlights will include regimental journals, enlistment books and photographs. The Long, Long Trail ionglongtrail.co.uk Chris Baker plans to update the ‘How to research a soldier' page of his First World War stalwart, and add more material on British artillery. The Ogilby…

Share your family stoiy with us and you could appear in the magazine! Please write to us at the address on page 6 or email wdytyaeditorial@ourmedia.co.uk RESOURCES The Wards found these three resources especially helpful EMBROIDERERS' GUILD a Discover Bucks Museum, Church Street, Aylesbury HP20 2QP w embroiderersguild.com The charity's artistic director Arrthea Godfrey and other staff shared their expert advice. GILLIES ARCHIVES w gilliesarchives.org.uk Plastic Surgeon Sir Harold Gillies helped servicemen injured in the First World War. The site has an index and a range of material, some of which is available on Find my past at bit.ly/fmp-gillies. NATIONAL ARMY MUSEUM a Royal Hospital Road, Chelsea, London SW3 4HT t 020 7730 0717 e info@nam.ac.uk w nam.ac.uk The NAM holds a vast range of items from the First World…

1)Name The first column reveals the deceased's name and the number of the burial in the register, here 43710. 2)Date The precise date of burial can help you to locate the record of death from a few days earlier on the site ScotlandsPeople (scotlandspeople.gov.uk).3)COMPT In the burials column you will find the compartment and the number noted, within which your deceased relation was interred. 4)AGE The deceased's age is noted, which can also help you to locate a birth record via ScotlaridsPeople. 5)DEPTH The inclusion of the depth can indicate if this was an initial burial or a later one that occurred at a higher depth. 6)UNDERTAKER The undertaker's firm is listed as well as a number from the corresponding lair book, which may list additional burials in the same plot. From the 19th…

Originally founded in November 1917, the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS) was a branch of the Royal Navy. Between 1917 and 1919, more than 5,000 women answered the call on recruitment posters to “Free a man for sea service” and joined up. They became known as Wrens, and their motto was “Never at sea”. The women undertook vital shore-based roles such as cooking and cleaning; typing, telephony and telegraphy; and motor driving and dispatch riding. There were also skilled jobs including boiler cleaning; sailmaking; electrical testing; working on mine-nets, depth charges and gas masks; and coding and decoding messages. More than 5,000 women answere the call on recruitment posters Women joined the WRNS either as an officer or a rating, and there were distinct divisions between the ranks. For ratings,…

Was my William Butchart born in Scotland? QMy 3x great grandfather William Butchart was Dorn in South Shields, according to both his Merchant Navy record and the 1851 census when he was living in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk. In the register of seamen’s tickets I found a record dated August 1845 stating that William was 46 years old, and born on 10 October 1799 in South Shields. I’ve searched without success for a baptism there and in surrounding areas. The Butchart/Butchard surname is prevalent in Scotland. The baptismal records on ScotlandsPeople (scotlandspeople.gov.uk) have a William Butchart born 10 October 1798 in Forfar, baptised on 14 October 1798, son of James Butchart and Janet Findlay. Could this be my ancestor? Margaret George A There are complications when it comes to your proposed…

QMy grandfather was in the 9th Battalion of the Rifle Brigade during the First World War, and I found this photo among the pictures of him. I have no idea who is depicted, but in his diary from the time he lists “Corporal Janatt - 5th Dorset, Corporal Gurmonk - 2nd Cavalry Division, Private Kerr do DADRT BEF, Sergeant Ladd - 5th Rifle Brigade Minster and Alfonso Henry, Brigadier - 4e Artillery 56th Brig”. Could it be them? Brenda Berrill A This is a casual group photograph of an officer and four other ranks, at least one in the Rifle Brigade, probably from early 1915, I doubt it includes the individuals mentioned in your grandfather's diary. They may be identifiable using the Medal Index Cards (MICs) and medal rolls, available…

When ‘Your Projects’ last visited Woking in February 2020, we spoke to the creator of a trail dedicated to the town’s Muslim heritage. One of the highlights was Brookwood Cemetery, the home of the first Muslim burial ground in the UK. But the cemetery also has the highest concentration of minority burial grounds altogether in the UK, serving as the last resting place for immigrants who made the UK their home. A recent project has revealed their stories. ‘The Living and the Dead: Exploring Minority Burial Grounds in Brookwood Cemetery’ began in 2020 and ran for two years. The project was led by Woking Asian Business Forum in partnership with Surrey History Centre, Brookwood Cemetery Society and The Lightbox, an art gallery in Woking, and funded with a £93,400 grant…

DIRECTORIES W tinyurl.com/sco-surrey The University of Leicester's site Special Collections Online includes an 1878 Post Office directory of Surrey and a 1913 Kelly’s directory. MILITARY INDEXES w tinyurl.com/surreycc-militaryindexes Here you'll find a number of PDF Indexes to local military records, such as ‘Queen's Royal West Surrey Regiment Prisoners of War 1918' and 'East Surrey Regiment Boer War Medals 1899-1902'. SCHOOL ADMISSIONS w tinyurl.com/surreycc-school Explore an index to admissions to the Royal Philanthropic School at Redhill (1788— 1906). The original records are at Surrey History Centre and give detailed accounts of the pupils. SUFFRAGE INDEXES w tinyurl.com/exp-surr-suff On the site Exploring Surrey's Past you can sit through names drawn from newspapers and periodicals that reference the suffrage campaign in Surrey. WW1 DATABASE w surreyinthegreatwar.org.uk This website records the lives and service…

During the mid19th century, the people of the Highlands and Hebrides suffered from famine and rounds of clearances. On the Gairloch Estate, however; local landlord Dr John Mackenzie worked to implement agricultural reforms for the benefit of his, tenants. Gairloch Museum holds a copy of a pamphlet that Dr John sent to his tenants and reveals more about his changes, as curator Karen Buchanan explains. John was an agricultural reformer and set up a model farm on an island CAN YOU DESCRIBE THE PAMPHLET? This small pamphlet is a parting message from an estate factor to his tenants, with whom he has had a somewhat difficult relationship over the past 15 yearsi Dr John Mackenzie was a member of the Mackenzie of Gairloch family; his father was the 4th Baronet…

The 22nd of October 1707 saw one of the worst tragedies in Royal Navy history when four warships were wrecked on the remote Western Rocks of the Isles of Scilly, around 1,450 sailors losing their lives. One of the vessels was 90-gun Association, Admiral of the Fleet, Sir Cloudesley Shovell’s lavishly appointed flagship. Admiral Shovell, as famous in his day as Lord Nelson would be a century later, also lost his life. The loss or these ships was due to a navigational error largely brought about by inability to establish longitude at sea, and as a result of the tragedy in 1714 parliament introduced the Longitude Act, leading to John Harrison creating his famous seagoing chronometers. It’s impossible to estimate the number of lives that have been saved over the…

WEBSITES TO WATCH Our annual look-ahead has been running for over 10 years now, straddling two census releases, three summer Olympics, countless prime minsters, the passing of a monarch, and a global pandemic. Sharing what’s in store for family historians is great fun. Commercial constraints might keep gatekeepers tight-lipped on some projects, but there’s always plenty to get excited about. We’ve sought to give space to both big-ticket items and more local and esoteric material. Of the former, perhaps the most important is the longawaited 1921 census of Scotland, due on ScotlandsPeople before 2022 is out. There’s news too from the Ogilby Trust, which launched its one-stop hub for digitised material from regimental museums in late 2021. We have details of upcoming tranches of data from the likes of Ancestry…

The death of a loved one in Scotland is not the last part of their journey, with the disposal of their remains the final act performed on their behalf. Where the records generated by such an event have survived they can be a useful aid for genealogical research. Historically in Scotland, while the Church of Scotland (‘the Kirk’) was tasked with recording information about such burials, many parishes did not do so, or their records have not survived. This means that coverage is only available for about a third of parishes. The oldest surviving registers are from Aberdeen, dating back to 1538, but for many parishes not a single one exists - you can check the available coverage on the website of the National Records of Scotland: nrscotland.gov.uk/research/guides/old-parish-registers/listof-old-parish-registers. The majority…

ARTICLE When John Met Benny Julie-Marie Strange tinyurl.com/john-met-benny Find out about the place of pets in working-class families in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. BOOKS Animal Companions Ingrid H Tague Penn State University Press, 2015 Tague's book looks at how pets reflected and shaped cultural debates in 18th-century Britain, including the relationship between humans and animals. At Home and Astray Philip Howell University of Virginia Press, 2015 Howell explains how dogs came to be at the heart of the middleclass home in Victorian Britain. PODCAST OF DOGS AND DUCHESSES w tinyurl.com/bbc-dog-duch This entertaining 14-minute programme from 2019 explores lapdog ownership among the 18th-century aristocracy. RECORDS DOGTAX AND LICENCES w tinyurl.com/sp-dogs The free site ScotlandsPlaces has Scottish dog-tax records (1797-1798). Records for Irish dog licences are on Ancestry (1810-1926; bit.ly/anc-ire-dogs) and Findmypast (18661914;…

So much has happened since our last visit to Surrey in early 2019. Family historians now have various top-notch digital resources created by Surrey History Centre in Woking, with records, finding aids, research guides and articles, all with the goal of “discovering, preserving, celebrating” the county’s heritage. Staff continued to ‘level up’ through the depths of the pandemic, making additions and improvements to what was already a packed resource. Lauren Simmons, events and promotions officer at Surrey Heritage, tells us that during the periods of lockdown the team added more than 11,000 detailed summaries of wills of Surrey people that were proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, which were prepared by the “indefatigable” Cliff Webb. “The original documents are held at The National Archives (reference PROB), but images can…

EXPLORING OXFORDSHIRE SURNAMES People, Places And Lives Sue Honoré, Richard Merry and Jessica Feinstein Matador, 328 pages, £24.99 I recently discovered that my Wiggins ancestors were from Witney, and that early generations were involved in the blanket-weaving industry. DNA testing has also led me on a surprise trail from Berkshire to Oxfordshire, and links with the surnames Harris and Bunting from Banbury. I therefore welcomed the opportunity to learn more about Oxfordshire and its surnames in this new publication. The book was inspired by two projects led by the Oxfordshire Family History Society (OFHS): the Oxfordshire Surnames Project and the Oxfordshire DNA Project. Both have been helped by the sterling work of the OFHS which has transcribed and indexed the parish registers, allowing for a detailed analysis of records for 408 Oxfordshire…

HSBC History history.hsbe.com Here you can already trawl 4,000 First World War index cards and staff photos, and In 2023 there are plans to continue to publish back issues of company magazines. There’s also a new virtual tour of the bank’s archive in London. Modern Records Centre Warwick.ac.uk/ services/!ibrary/mrc/archives_ online/digital/unionjournals Expect more digitised tradeunion and labour-movement journals to appear in 2023, and it's also worth exploring the Sweated Trades digitisation project, investigating attempts to regulate sweatshop industries in the eariy 20th century. Railway Work, Life and Death railwayaccidents.port.ac.uk Following the release of 17,000 records, this website is preparing to add some 15,000 records of members of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants/ National Union of Railwaymen. Covering the late 1880s through to 1921, details will include name; union branch; payment(s);…

On 12 November 2018, 100 years and a day after the Armistice was signed, Anne Ward walked into the British Red Cross charity shop in Brecon, Powys, Mid-Wales, unaware that her life was about to change. “I was looking for a tablecloth for a Christmas party, and the manager brought out a bag of white linens from the back. “I happily rummaged in the bag of tablecloths and bed sheets. And then I saw something trimmed with lace,” Anne says in the selfpublished book Twelve Secret Voices (Aspect Design, 2021). ‘ I eased it out and unfolded it. It was an arrangement of white square panels, three across and four down. Each was embroidered in its centre with white thread and they in turn were joined with a wide strip…

Robert Currie was born in Camlachie, Glasgow, on 19 December 1902, to Irish-born Robert Currie, a prominent member of the Royal Black Preceptory (a Protestant fraternal society) in Glasgow, and Elizabeth Morrow. Growing up to work as a joiner, Robert junior married on 25 March 1927, but tragically died on 10 February 1929 at 187% Dalmarnock Road, Bridgeton, Glasgow, the cause being nephrotic cardiac syncope. After I obtained a copy of his death record from the General Register Office in 2002, the next stage was to try to find where he was buried, by contacting Glasgow City Council's burials department.The council staff suggested that Robert junior was buried at the Eastern Necropolis in an unmarked grave. However, people do occasionally make mistakes. In this case, arecent email from MyHeritagmyheritage.com flagged…

ARCHIVE SCOTLANDSPEOPLE CENTRE a General Register House, 2 Princes Street, Edinburgh EH1 3YY t 0131334 0380 e customerservices @scotlandspeople.gov.uk w tinyurl.com/nrs-spc Visitors to the centre can access its records, including the memorial inscriptions in its library, for £15 a day. BOOKS The Graveyards and Cemeteries of Edinburgh Charlotte Gol ledge Amberley Publishing, 2020 Gol ledge provides a detailed insight into some of Edinburgh's finest cemeteries, including Greyfriars Kirkyard. Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet Chris Paton Pen and Sword, 2020 Chris' guide explains the records online per county, and includes a chapter on making the most of the ScotlandsPeople website. WEBSITES FRIENDS OF THE GLASGOW NECROPOLIS w glasgownecropolis.org As well as providing background resources to understand Glasgow's most iconic cemetery, this site lists walking tours and books. MORAY…

BOOK Tracing Your Service Women Ancestors Mary Ingham Pen & Sword, 2012 This book has an interesting chapter on the WRNS. MUSEUM EXPLOSION MUSEUM OF NAVAL FIREPOWER a Priddy’s Hard, Heritage Way, Gosport P012 4LE t 023 9250 5600 e enquiries@nmrn.org.uk w tinyurl.com/nmrn-explo The museum's gallery, The Night Hunters: The Royal Navy's Coastal Forces at War’, features the work of the WRNS during the Second World War. WEBSITE IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM w iwm.org.uk/collections The site's WRNS material includes photos, paintings and images of uniforms from the First World War. TOP TIP! Officers who resigned in 1918 for personal reasons are omitted from the officers’ hies (ADM 318). Try searching the appointment registers of officers (ADM 321) instead.…

Side View is a true breakthrough m the world or genetic genealogy. The technology, which is only possible thanks to the extensive match database of Ancestry DNA (ancestry.co.uk/dna), enables the automatic assignment of DNA matches to differen sides of your family. Until recently, researchers have had t manually assign AncestryDNA matches by reviewing the trees of their matches and using grouping techniques such as the Leeds Method (see tinyurl.com/leeds-cluster). This is particularly challenging for people whose parents are not available to test, and for anyone with adoption or other unknown parentage in their recent family history. SideView allows AncestryDNA to sort your matches into one of four categories: ‘Parent 1’, ‘Parent 2’, ‘Both sides’ or ‘Unassigned’. This guide will enable you to make the most of the new ‘By parent’…

A picture paints a thousand words, and this is particularly true in genealogy. If you have stumbled upon old family photographs and are finding them hard to identify, be inspired by Rita Boswell who has unlocked the secrets of an album dating back to Victorian times. MY BRICK WALL While browsing in an antiques shop called The Collector’s Market in Eastbourne, East Sussex, in 2017,1 spotted a stack of old photograph albums. I was drawn to one that had a strong tooled leather cover with a brass clasp, so I bought it. There were 56 photographs inside, mostly studio portraits taken in the mid19th and early 20th centuries. Fortunately, there was an inscription on the fly leaf that said, “Frank Repton fro [sic]: Bouverie, Ostend May 4th 1873.” Having grown…

Rosemary Collins highlights three digital resources that caught our eye this month LISTEN LADY KILLERS WITH LUCY WORSLEY tinyurl.com/bbc-lady-killers Free Historian and broadcaster Lucy Worsley presents this Radio 4 series investigating notorious murders committed by women in the Victorian age from a feminist perspective. The cases include Madeleine Smith, accused of poisoning her secret lover; American axe murderer Lizzie Borden; and Mary Ann Cotton, Britain's first female serial killer. WATCH Englesea Brook Chapel & Museum tinyurl.com/yt-englesea Free Englesea Brook Chapel & Museum, whose heritage officer Amy Wilkinson featured in our ‘Gem From the Archive' article last issue, has uploaded a useful series of videos exploring the history of Primitive Methodism, covering such topics as Survival of the Fittest: The “Extinction” of Female Preaching in the 19th Century and Dispelling the…

During the 18th and 19th centuries, northeast England was home to a thriving pottery industry. Sunderland lustreware proved particularly popular with its pink glaze and decorative scenes of rural idylls and local landmarks. This style of pottery is considered very collectible today. “In 1982, my twin brother Phillip decided to research our family history,” explains Anthony Patterson. “We were overwhelmed to discover that our great great grandfather Thomas Patterson had owned a large and thriving business in Gateshead called Sheriff Hill Pottery. “George designed a pie centrepiece to avoid juice overspilling in baking” “ His son George was also a successful pottery manufacturer. Some of their creations are on display at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle upon Tyne and Shipley Art Gallery in Gateshead.” Anthony decided to write a…