Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2023 i Who Do You Think You Are?

What a pleasure It is for me to be here welcoming you all to our 200th issue. I particularly want to say a special hello and thank you to the 137 of you who have been subscribers since our very first issue! So much has happened in the world of family history since we launched the magazine in 2007. Digitisation has made genealogy more accessible and opened up fascinating new resources. At the same time, DNA testing has become a useful and affordable tool. Over the years we have kept our ear to the ground to bring you the latest family history news and updates, but the heart of our magazine isn’t records and documents, it’s people. We wanted to create a magazine that helped you understand your forebears as…

Share your family story 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 These three sites helped Jenny research her maternal line BUCKINGHAMSHIRE ARCHIVES w tinyurl.com/bucks-arch Jenny made some fantastic breakthroughs at the county archive in Aylesbury. Many local archives have records that are not available online. FINDMYPAST w findmypast.co.uk/1921-census The 1921 census of England and Wales, exclusively available on Findmypast, has helped Jenny to find several generations, and in-laws, all living under one roof. GENERAL REGISTER OFFICE w www.gro.gov.uk The GRO's index of births back to the 1830s includes the mother's maiden name. It can be searched for free, but you do need to create a user account.…

1 AGE Nurses had to give their age, but unfortunately not their date of birth. Be cautious, particularly when you need to decipher aged and faded documents. 2 MARITAL STATUS Note that married women were asked their maiden name, in this case Stewart. This can help you to verify that the nurse you have found in the records is indeed your ancestor. 3 PREVIOUS EMPLOYMENT Details of the places that a nurse has worked can help you research their career further. Records of Barnhill can be found in Glasgow City Archives, including photographs from the year that Ellard worked there. 4 SIGNATURE The applicant's signature helpfully provides a sample of their handwriting that you can match with other records. 5 DATE The registration date can also help you link up with other records. 6 REFERENCES…

Why was Hannah Mark born in France? Q My 3× great grandmother, Hannah Mark, was (according to the census) born in Calais, France, in 1854. Her father, mother and all her siblings were born in England, and I can find no other links to France. Her father, Thomas Mark, worked for the British and Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company. Was the family in France because of this work? Annalise Mowbray A The civil registration of births, marriages and deaths began in France in 1792. The records are kept by departments (the rough equivalents of counties), and are available online free of charge. Unfortunately, there is no online master index. For help finding Hannah Mark's birth record, I turned to the FamilySearch Research Wiki (in English), specifically the page for the Pas-de-Calais…

Q This is my great uncle Joseph Henry Smyth (1908–1996). Is there anything you can tell me about his service in the Second World War? There’s a rumour he spent time in India. Karen Smyth A This is a nice informal photograph of a Royal Artilleryman taken in approximately 1943/1944, possibly in Swindon. Service records for the Second World War remain closed, but we’re fortunate that Joseph had a slightly unusual surname and was in the Royal Artillery. Ancestry has digitised the Royal Artillery tracer cards (1939–1948), available at ancestry.co.uk/search/collections/61820. I searched, and his is among them. It says that his Army Number was 1657716, and he enlisted on 16 September 1940. He served in the 25th Light Anti-Aircraft (AA) Regiment in 1940, 107th Heavy AA Regiment and 205th Medium/Heavy…

The First World War brought about huge social change in Britain, including female emancipation, increased workers’ rights and major scientific advances. Soldiers returned from the Western Front changed men, some questioning the conventional strictures of the working-class experience. One such man was Edward ‘Ted’ Ruddy. His relation Sue Greenwood has become enthralled by what she has discovered about his life. MY BRICK WALL Great Uncle Ted was famous in our family for his adventures. He died before I was born, but he lived on in the stories that Mum used to tell me. She visited him and his wife Lilian when they lived in London, and spoke of their “posh flat”, bohemian lifestyle and glamorous friends. The couple were also deeply in love. It was a world away from Ted’s…

AROUND BRITAIN The three ridings of Yorkshire came into being during the Norse period, surrounding the administratively distinct City of York. The main towns are Middlesbrough, Northallerton, Redcar, Scarborough and Whitby, and when the modern North Yorkshire council area was formed in 1974, it covered most of the North Riding, took bites out of the East and West Ridings, and swallowed York whole. There are all sorts of smallerscale administrative wrinkles that genealogists will have to watch out for. Langbaurgh, for example, was a wapentake - an Old Norse term for an administrative division, which survives in several English counties. Langbaurgh covered a north-eastern tip of the riding, later giving its name to a non-metropolitan district, becoming Langbaurgh-on-Tees in 1974, then, since 1996, becoming the unitary authority of Redcar and…

ALDERSON Alderson is a relationship name from the Middle English personal name Aldus and the word ‘son'. BARWICK This name has the same root as the surname Berwick (from the Old English for an outlying grange or farm), but this form of spelling was more common in North Yorkshire. BLAND Although found throughout Yorkshire, Blands are particularly prevalent in the districts of Clayton, Keighley and Scarborough. BULMER This locative name comes from Bulmer in the Ryedale district of North Yorkshire. COVERDALE This locative name comes from Coverdale in the North Riding of Yorkshire. DINSDALE This name originates in Over Dinsdale and Low Dinsdale, which are on opposite sides of the Tees. HODGSON Widespread throughout the north of England, Hodgson comes from the Middle English personal name Hodge - itself a…

Aberdeen grew rapidly in the Victorian era, thanks to the success of the city’s granite, fishing and shipbuilding industries. However, this expansion was accompanied by increases in poverty and crime. Alexander Thomson, a member and sometime chair of the Aberdeen County Rural Constabulary Committee who also served on the County of Aberdeen Prison Board, spent years focusing on juvenile crime and reform. His guard book or scrapbook holds documents relating to these issues and is a valuable source for family historians, as Phil Astley, Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire Archives’ city archivist, explains. WHAT CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT THE GUARD BOOK? The book contains the papers of Alexander Thomson (1792-1862). He lived mainly at Banchory House in Aberdeenshire, and he held a number of positions that were relevant to the…

Rosemary Collins highlights three digital resources that caught our eye this month WATCH GENEALOGY STORIES tinyurl.com/yt-genealogy-stories Free This YouTube channel from genealogist Natalie Pithers features a collection of useful videos. They include historian Laura Newman talking about the important work of ‘Addressing Health' - one of our former Transcription Tuesday projects (see page 20) - in uncovering the health of workers in the Victorian and Edwardian Post Office, and an interview with the researchers who helped transcribe Anne Lister's extraordinary diaries. WEBSITE GENEALOGY JUDE genealogyjude.com Free Judith Batchelor is a tutor with the Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies, and regularly contributes to WDYTYA? Magazine. Her blog includes some fascinating entries about stories she has uncovered in her research, including the life of her grandfather’s first cousin who died in…

Two factors in Marion Nash’s life prompted her to research her family tree - the birth of her grandson Tim, and the advent of the worldwide web: “Suddenly I felt a need to find out more about my family.” “My grandmother Marion McCabe lived in the Stanrigg and Airdrie areas of North Lanarkshire in Scotland,” she continues. “I began researching the McCabes there, and found a book in Airdrie Library about a disaster at a coal mine that mentioned the surname.” The book also revealed that Marion’s distant cousin John McCabe had performed an act of heroism. Naturally, she began researching him. He was born on 6 December 1901 at Longriggend, just a few miles from Stanrigg. When John left school he became a miner, like his father Joseph. He…

Florence Nightingale once said that nursing was left to “those who were too old, too weak, too drunken, too dirty, too stupid or too bad to do anything else”. This shocking statement is an indication of the terrible reputation of nurses prior to the reforms of the 19th and 20th century. Viewed as lowly and unskilled, most nurses were held in similar regard to housemaids. For the lower classes, training was free and they were paid a salary. However, there was no consistent standard of training with some nurses mainly scrubbing floors. For middle- or upperclass women, training was available for a fee. Promotion was swift, with just four years from trainee nurse to matron in some instances. However, even these nurses were viewed with suspicion because it was considered…

Choosing a site by one of my #HouseHistoryHour colleagues might sound like the height of nepotism, so I recommend that you pay a visit and decide for yourself! Keith Searle's Trace My House (tracemyhouse.com) is jam-packed with useful information, tips and examples for the budding house historian to consult. The website describes how you might begin researching by examining your own house, looking for clues that may indicate its age or even a former use. Of course, most houses don’t have handy (or even accurate) date stones, so the advice includes looking at the architectural style, roof angles, window shape and construction materials. The site is easy to navigate and includes three key sections on the homepage with dropdown menus: 'The House', 'The People' and 'The Stories’. A series of…

Q We think the relatives in this photo are from Swettenham in Cheshire – possibly Thomas Vawdrey (born 1815), a farmer, and his son, also Thomas (born 1848), a schoolmaster. When do you think it was taken? Stephen Vaughan A Judging from its dimensions and appearance, this is an unmounted cabinet-sized photo. The cabinet print/card/portrait measuring about 4½ × 6½ inches when mounted was a standard format introduced in 1866 but chiefly popular in the 1890s and early 1900s, dying out by the First World War. By the late 19th century, outdoor photography was advancing, partly due to technical innovations. In this example, the natural open-air setting is a domestic garden. The composition and image quality suggest either a professional photograph taken by a local studio representative hired to visit…

BRs featured colourful female champions, notably the redoubtable Flora Solomon (née Benenson) of Marks & Spencer. Solomon was the daughter of a multimillionaire Russian Jewish émigré exiled after the Bolshevik takeover. As an enthusiastic Zionist, her first experience of public feeding came in 1920s Jerusalem where she established a milk depot for the local poor. In the following decade she was recruited to improve working conditions at Marks & Spencer by Simon Marks, the son of the store’s co-founder Michael Marks, whom she knew through Jewish networks in London. Solomon soon established subsidised staff canteens at branches across the country. In her rather self-serving memoir Solomon claimed credit for re-igniting the communal restaurant in the Second World War by, in her own words, “penetrating” the “bastion of government” that was…

71 Five thousand men from the 9th Legion march from Lincoln to set up camp and conquer York. 1570 Guy Fawkes, also known as Guido, is born in York. He is executed in 1606 following the failure of the Gunpowder Plot. 1728 Explorer James Cook, better known as Captain Cook, is born in the village of Marton near Middlesbrough. 1839 Charlotte Brontë visits Norton Conyers near Ripon while working as a governess. She incorporates elements of the house for Thornfield Hall in her novel Jane Eyre (1847). 1924 Campaigner and socialist politician Ellen Wilkinson is elected MP for Middlesbrough East, thereby becoming the only female MP in the Labour Party. 1952 The North York Moors, one of the largest expanses of heather moorland in the UK, is designated a National…

OFF THE RECORD Alan Crosby shares his views on family history Two hundred issues of the magazine… a great milestone and a cause for celebration! Unless I’m mistaken, I have contributed to every single issue since we first appeared in October 2007, and it’s been a real pleasure and a privilege to be involved. From the outset I was particularly impressed with the philosophy of the magazine. To me, family history is so much more than the collecting and piecing together of names and dates. I have always wanted to know more about the people themselves - my ancestors. What were their lives like? How were they educated (if at all), what work did they do and in what conditions? Did they own their own land, or rent property, or…

The story of Jenny Cross’ maternal family begins during the reign of Queen Anne, with an illicit romance between a young man and his older married lover. They and their descendants lived in a tiny village in Buckinghamshire where most of them worked the land. Some of us sigh when we see the words “agricultural labourer” listed as an ancestor’s occupation, believing that there will be little more to find out. However, Jenny’s research has proved how fascinating they can be. “My quest began in the early 1980s,” Jenny explains. “I knew that my parents Frederick Hills and Gertrude King were distantly related, and I wanted to find out how. It took me 10 years, pre-internet, to discover that they were second cousins. Dad’s grandmother Elizabeth King was the sister…

Ethel Gordon Fenwick (née Manson) was born in 1857 in Morayshire, Scotland. She began her nursing career at the age of 21, in a children's hospital in Nottingham. She left the profession after her marriage to Dr Bedford Fenwick in 1887, as was customary at the time, but was far from idle. Fenwick was a writer and an active suffragist, and became the first president of the International Council of Nurses in 1899. However, it is her decades-long campaigning for the introduction of a compulsory nurses' register for which she is remembered. Fenwick was strongly against the idea of a voluntary register, resulting in her forming a dedicated group in 1887 that became the British Nurses' Association. The BNA sought “to unite all British nurses in membership of a recognised…

BOOKS A History of Nursing Louise Wyatt Amberley Publishing, 2019 Wyatt explores the earliest records of the profession. War to Windrush, 2nd Edn Stephen Bourne Jacaranda Books, 2018 This book celebrates the contribution of black women to British nursing between 1939 and 1948 in a decade of major social change. WEBSITES MEMORIES OF NURSING w memoriesofnursing.uk Listen to interviews from an oral history project conducted by the Retired Nurses National Home and Bournemouth University. QARANC w qaranc.co.uk/qaimns.php Find out about members of Queen Alexandra's Royal Army Nursing Corps. ROYAL COLLEGE OF NURSING w rcn.org.uk/library/archives/Family-history The website of the RCN includes back issues of its journal (1888-1956). SCARLET FINDERS w scarletfinders.co.uk This is an important site for researching British military nurses, Voluntary Aid Detachments and military hospitals in the First World…

BRITAIN FROM ABOVE w britainfromabove.org.uk This website is based around a collection of 95,000 aerial photographs, the majority taken between 1919 and 1953. BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR LOCAL HISTORY w balh.org.uk Here you’ll find links to websites of local groups and one-place studies, many of which will have their own links section that you can dig into. BRITISH NEWSPAPER ARCHIVE w britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk Find advertisements for houses for sale or let in local newspapers, sometimes including detailed descriptions of the building. NATIONAL LIBRARY OF IRELAND w catalogue.nli.ie The NLI’s catalogue contains references to more than 150,000 photographs, of which about half have been digitised. NATIONAL LIBRARY OF WALES w tinyurl.com/nlw-digital-gallery-photos View digital versions of some of the NLW’s photographic collection. There's also the Welsh Tithe Maps website at places.library.wales. SOCIETY FOR ONE-PLACE…

ARTICLE Interpreting Choices w tinyurl.com/prob-inter Rebecca’s article, which was published in The Journal of Genealogy and Family History (Vol. 5, No. 1, 2021), provides new data about where and how nonconformists married. It draws on hundreds of examples provided by family historians, and can be downloaded for free. BOOKS Cofrestri Anghydffurfiol Cymru/Nonconformist Registers of Wales Dafydd Evans Immel Publishing, 1994 This good summary of surviving Welsh registers is in Welsh as well as English. Marriage Law for Genealogists, 2nd Edn Rebecca Probert Takeaway, 2016 Rebecca’s book sets out the underpinning law on what was required for a marriage.…

Q My relative, Edward Weaver, who may be my paternal grandfather based on DNA results, joined the Militia on 1 February 1906 at the Stratford Recruiting Office, East London. The attestation corps was the 6th Battalion, Middlesex Regiment. His service number was 3969. His home address and next of kin confirm that he is the man I am looking for. However, after that date he seems to disappear, but was he in the Mile End part of London in autumn 1922 when my father was conceived? On Edward’s attestation document, which I found on Findmypast (findmypast.co.uk), the following typed message appears: “The Recruiting Staff Officer, Stratford, would feel obliged if, in the event of this man becoming non-effective during his drill on enlistment, you would report the fact and cause…

TECH TIPS The 1921 Scottish census was finally released on 30 November 2022 by the government website ScotlandsPeople (scotlandspeople.gov.uk). You can search the census for free, and then pay the equivalent of £1.50 (or six credits) for each record you subsequently view. Your money buys you access to a digital image of the original census page, with options for both saving (as JPEG or PDF) or printing the page to add to your personal records. There’s no standalone web page for searching the 1921 census; instead, its records have been fully integrated into the main website to sit alongside all of the other records on offer, including previous census returns (from 1841 to 1911) as well as both church and statutory records. This means that if you’re already familiar with…

ARCHIVE THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES a Bessant Drive, Richmond TW9 4DU t 020 8876 3444 w nationalarchives.gov.uk Material about BRs is held by TNA within its collections of records from the MOF (tinyurl.com/tna-discovery-mof). BOOKS Eggs or Anarchy William Sitwell Simon & Schuster, 2016 This exploration of the wartime MOF and its inspirational leader, Lord Woolton, is very readable. Feeding the People in Wartime Britain Bryce Evans Bloomsbury, 2022 Bryce chronicles public feeding schemes during the world wars. From Plain Fare to Fusion Food Derek J Oddy Boydell Press, 2003 Find out how the British diet changed between the 1890s and the 1990s. How Britain Was Fed in War Time Ministry of Food, 1946 This booklet, available free through the Internet Archive at tinyurl.com/arch-britain-fed, gives the official history of food in the…

CAUSE PAPERS w dhi.ac.uk/causepapers This searchable database is based on cases heard in church courts between 1300 and 1858 in the Diocese of York. DIRECTORIES w tinyurl.com/sco-yorks The digitised directories here include a 1913 volume covering York and Hull, and a combined edition for the North and East Riding from 1893. INDEXES w yorkshirebmd.org.uk Part of the Local BMD Project group, this website brings together indexes to births, marriages and deaths back to the start of civil registration in 1837. MARRIAGE BONDS w tinyurl.com/fs-yorks-marr FamilySearch includes the collection ‘England, Yorkshire Marriage Bonds and Allegations, 1613-1887’, based on material at the Borthwick Institute. PARISH REGISTERS w tinyurl.com/fs-yorks-reg FamilySearch also holds parish registers for 1538-2016 from the Borthwick Institute, Doncaster Archives, East Riding Archives, Sheffield City Archives, North Yorkshire County Record Office…