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

SARAH'S TOP TIP You can download some British Army officers’ service records for free At the start of lockdown, The National Archives (TNA) at Kew made its digitised collections free to download via its online catalogue Discovery (discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk). You have to register to benefit, but there are some real gems worth seeking out. Phil Tomaselli's article about Army Lists on page 38 shows that, for 19th-century officers, you can download their service records, full of military and family details. Although we all have as many female as male ancestors, it's very hard as a family historian not to find that our time and attention gets drawn to the men in our tree. It's not just a question of surnames passing down the male line, it's also because men tended to…

Email wdytyaeditorial@ourmedia.co.uk to feature your event here for free PICK OF THE MONTH Discover how to take your family tree back to the Middle Ages MEDIEVAL GENEALOGY STUDY DAY 18 October w tinyurl.com/sog-medieval-genealogy-day This online event from the Society of Genealogists is sponsored by the Foundation for Medieval Genealogy (fmg.ac). There will be seven talks, including ‘Beyond the Mists of Time: Sources for Medieval Genealogy’ by former Who Do You Think You Are? researcher Nick Barratt, ‘Languages, Dating and Scripts’ by archivist Christopher Whittick, and the society's genealogist Else Churchill (see page 29) interviewing Ian Mortimer, author of such books as The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England (2008). £100, or £80 for members of the foundation. IN PERSON “TEACH THESE CHILDREN NOTHING BUT FACTS” VICTORIAN SCHOOL LOGS 17 October…

Findmypast introduces three-month subscriptions Findmypast (findmypast.co.uk) has launched a range of threemonth subscriptions in addition to its existing one-month and annual packages. The new subscriptions to the family history site cost £38.49 at ‘Plus’ level, which includes the 1939 Register, parish registers, wills and electoral registers; £49.99 at ‘Pro’ level, which also includes international records and access to the British Library's newspaper collection; and £59.99 at ‘Premium’ level, which also includes the 1921 census for England and Wales. Warri ngton family history service holds first session A free family history advice service has launched in Cheshire. The Warrington Group of Liverpool & South West Lancashire Family History Society (lswlfhs.org.uk/Warrington) heid a Q&A session at Warrington Archives in the Central Library (wmag.culturewarrington.org ) on 23 September, and the next sessions take…

WikiTree (wikitree.com) has apologised after its members’ data was accessed by a hacker. The members of the free family history website aim to build the world's largest accurate collaborative family tree. WikiTree currently has 35,568,937 profiles edited by 1,039,791 members. In a statement on 28 August, WikiTree founder Chris Whitten said, “We have just discovered a privacy leak that enabled a hacker to illegally download thousands of change histories for profiles, many of which were private, and some of which included account email addresses, names, and dates of birth, but not passwords.” “He discovered a backdoor way to view the history of changes to a profile (‘diff’ pages) as if he was a member of the Trusted List,” he continued. “The vulnerabilities in our code that enabled this method of…

In his 2016 episode EastEnders star Danny Dyer first discovered his great great grandmother Mary Ann Buttivant as a child in Mile End Workhouse registers. Mindful that a life of poverty and lack of education could lead people down a dark path, Danny then checked Findmypast's vast collection ‘England & Wales, Crime, Prisons & Punishment, 1770-1935’, finding Mary Ann tried at London's Central Criminal Court in 1895. The calendar of prisoners showed that she was bailed at the police court for “having been delivered of a child, [and] did, by secret disposition of the dead body, endeavour to conceal the birth thereof”. Danny's forebear was unmarried, just 17, and pleaded guilty. The indictment in Old Bailey records revealed that Mary Ann had given birth to a baby girl and placed…

In 2015 actor Frances de la Tour was intrigued to learn more about her aristocratic ancestor the Hon. Sophia Ann Delaval. Letters and estate papers for the Delaval family from the 18th century, held at Northumberland Archives, revealed that Frances’ 4x great grandmother Sophia brought shame to her family by having a child out of wedlock and marrying below her status, then separating from her husband for his ill-treatment of her. Chemists’ bills highlighted Sophia's subsequent laudanum addiction in the years leading up to her death in 1793 aged 38. A few years later, Frances 3x great grandmother Maria Elizabeth Adderley was married as a young teenager to a naval captain. While her husband was at sea in 1803, Maria had an affair with Sophia Ann Delaval's son Henry Jadis,…

CELEBRATING YOUR DISCOVERIES Ask Christine Wilkie what she remembers of her early childhood and she will describe a large estate house on stilts amid tropical blooms and palm trees. She was born in 1943 and lived on a sugar plantation called ‘Dekinderen’ that her father Alexander Weir managed. The estate was in Demerara, British Guiana, which became Guyana in 1966. The area was known as “the land of mud and sugar” because the Demerara River often flooded, hence the stilts. “The rain came down in sheets,” Christine recalls. “I remember being left in a sandpit during a torrential downpour, bawling my eyes out until my mother rescued me.” Christine's mother Margot (née Turpin) experienced a complete culture shock when the family moved to Banffshire in northeast Scotland. Alexander was suffering…

Silversmith Paul Storr produced much of the silver that graced the tables of royalty during the Georgian period, and his work is still very collectable. Among his most notable pieces is the ‘Battle of the Nile Cup’ which was presented to Lord Nelson after his victory in 1798, and is held by the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich (rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/rmgc-object-62002). Interestingly, Storr was not a member of the Goldsmiths’ Company, the most obvious livery company for his trade. His father Thomas Storr, although originally a silversmith, turned to innkeeping and apprenticed his son to William Rock, citizen and vintner (wine merchant), in 1784. In 1791 Paul Storr became a citizen and vintner of London by apprenticeship, and the admission papers on Ancestry (ancestry.co.uk) include his indenture as evidence. The collection also reveals…

LIBRARIES GUILDHALL LIBRARY a Aldermanbury, London EC2V 7HH t 020 7332 1868 e guildhall.library@cityoflondon.gov.uk w tinyurl.com/col-guild Records of London's guilds can be consulted here if you supply the appropriate ID. SOCIETY OF GENEALOGISTS a 40 Wharf Road, London N1 7GS t 020 7251 8799 e hello@sog.org.uk w sog.org.uk The society is in the middle of moving to Wharf Road. Check the website in case books have to be ordered in advance as opposed to being freely available in the library. WEBSITES GUILDS AND BELATED ORGANISATIONS IN GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND w www.bbk.ac.uk/library/downloads Thanks to the library of Birkbeck, University of London, you can download Tom Hoffman's invaluable bibliography explaining what is available to researchers. Part two covering provincial guilds is particularly useful. WORSHIPFUL COMPANY OF IRONMONGERS w ironmongers.org/archives Livery companies’…

CAUSE PAPERS DATABASE w dhi.ac.uk/causepapers This old but still fascinating database of more than 14,000 ‘cause papers’ relates to cases heard at church courts in the Diocese of York between 1300 and 1858. FAMILYSEARCH w familysearch.org/search/collection/list The countless collections on the free website FamilySearch can be narrowed down by era and place. At time of writing there were more than 150 collections relating to the UK that had at least partial coverage of the period. FREEREG w freereg.org.uk Transcriptions of parish records are widely available online, but FreeREG is a very useful place to dip your toe in the water. NATIONAL LIBRARY OF WALES w tinyurl.com/nlw-wills Here you can search wills that were proved in the Welsh ecclesiastical courts before 1858. Also, TNA has wills proved at the Prerogative Court…

ARCHIVE THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES a Kew, Richmond TW9 4DU t 020 8876 3444 w nationalarchives.gov.uk TNA's website includes an old, and now archived, description of its early officer records, but it's still worth looking at: tinyurl.com/tna-arch-off. WEBSITES ADVICE TO OFFICERS OF THE BRITISH ARMY w regimentalrogue.com/srsub/advicel782.htm Here you can read a transcription of a splendid, although slightly tongue-in-cheek, guide from 1782, which gives a flavour of army life at the time. THE OGILBY TRUST w armymuseums.org.uk The trust supports and promotes the regimental and corps museums of the British Army, which may have information and photographs of officers. Its website includes a museums directory with contact information.…

Q My mother, Betty Lilian Bravery, was born on 29 September 1920 in Friern Barnet, London. She was adopted into the Brock family in 1922, but I have found no registration of this. She married my father, Leslie Gadd, on 27 September 1941 at St John the Divine, Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, and died on 19 May 1999 in Blackburn, Lancashire. On my mother's birth certificate, her mother is recorded as Constance Lilian Bravery formerly Knight and her father as Charles Bravery. I'm not sure if they were actually married. How do I find out more about Constance and Charles? Godfrey William Brock-Gadd A Your mother's birth was registered on 4 October 1920 (when she was just five days old) by her father, Charles Bravery, a general labourer of 28 Beaconsfield Road,…

TECH TIPS Over the past few years, MyHeritage (myheritage.com) has revamped its online photo-editing and management tools. The latest addition is PhotoDater, which estimates when the pictures you upload were taken (see last issue's news story). However, in this beta stage it isn't that accurate. The underlying artificial-intelligence (AI) engine has only been trained with a relatively small group of photos - tens of thousands rather than millions - from repositories such as the Tibrary of Congress. Nevertheless, we're hopeful that it will continue to be refined and the results will improve. PhotoDater is just one of several new and enhanced features unveiled by MyHeritage since we last examined its photo tools in ‘Tech Tips’ in January 2021. So this issue we'll take another look at those editing and tagging…

ARCHIVE GIRTON COLLEGE ARCHIVES a Girton College, Cambridge CB3 0JG t 01223 338897 e archive@girton.cam.ac.uk w tinyurl.com/girton-arch The records of the Society for Promoting the Training of Women can be found at Cambridge University's first women's college. BOOKS Ann Veronica HG Wells T Fisher Unwin, 1909 This novel about a New Woman's adventures, based on the life of Wells’ lover Amber Reeves, is available digitally from tinyurl.com/arch-veron. Before the Suffragettes: Women's Emancipation in the 1890s David Rubinstein Branch Line, 1986 Rubinstein examines the New Woman at work and play. A US edition can be borrowed for free from the Internet Archive (tinyurl.com/arch-eman). The Story of a Modern Woman Ella Hepworth Dixon William Heinemann, 1894 This novel about a single woman striving to keep herself after her father's death is available…

BISHOPS’ TRANSCRIPTS w tinyurl.com/fs-cambs-bts FamilySearch includes Cambridgeshire Bishops' Transcripts (1538-1983) at Cambridge University Library, plus Huntingshire parish registers for the same period. PARISH REGISTERS w freereg.org.uk Free REG is useful for anyone with ancestors from this part of the world, with major collections of transcriptions for Cambridgeshire, Essex, Hertfordshire and Norfolk. LOCAL BMD INDEX w camdex.org.uk/search.cfm GRO birth, marriage and death records are copies of locally held records which you can search directly from here. MARRIAGE RECORDS w tinyurl.com/arch-hunts-marr The Internet Archive (archive.org) has all sorts of digitised volumes rejaing to the region, including this 1912 volume of Huntingdonshire marriages back to the 16th century. DIRECTORIES w tinyurl.com/sco-cambs You can download free digitised trade and street directories covering Cambridgeshire from the University of Leicester's website Special Collections Online. Those for…

ARCHIVES Cambridgeshire Archive Service (cambridgeshire.gov.uk/archives) runs two archives that between them hold records relating to Cambridgeshire and the former counties of Huntingdonshire and the Isle of Ely. CAMBRIDGESHIRE ARCHIVES a The Dock, Ely CB7 4GS t 01223 699399 e cambs.archives@cambridgeshire.gov.uk w tinyurl.com/cambs-arch Cambridgeshire Archives includes parish registers and probate material for the Diocese of Ely, as well as records from local courts, hospitals and asylums, Poor Law unions and nonconformist churches. HUNTINGDONSHIRE ARCHIVES a Huntingdon Library and Archives, Princes Street, Huntingdon PE29 SPA t 01480 372738 e hunts.archives@cambridgeshire.gov.uk w tinyurl.com/hunts-arch Huntingdonshire Archives holds material for the former county including local churches’ archives and records from local government, schools, businesses and estates. There's also the Huntingdonshire Collection at Huntingdon Library, with satellite collections in St Ives (tinyurl.com/cambs-st-ives-lib) and St Neots (tinyurl.com/cambs-st-neots-lib).…

NEWSLETTE GENEALOGY JACK jackpalmer.substack.com Free Jack Palmer may be young - he's just graduated from Duke University, North Carolina, USA, where he majored in history and psychology - but he has an impressive track record in family history, having begun his research when he was 10. Since 8 January he has been publishing a weekly email newsletter sharing stories from his tree and advice. Previous editions are online, and topics include identifying relations in old photographs. PODCAST KILLING VICTORIA tinyurl.com/bbc-sounds-kv Free During Queen Victoria's 63year reign, seven men tried to assassinate her. In this series for BBC Sounds, historian Dr Bob Nicholson dedicates an episode to each one, using police archives, census returns, court reports and newspapers to uncover their lives, and asking why they decided that she had to…

LAURA BERRY Laura is one of the lead genealogists behind Who Do You Think You Are? and on page 14 she shares her advice for exploring your female lines with tips from the TV series. CHLOE O'SHEA A professional genealogist and blogger based in Derbyshire, Chloe recommends a great free resource on page 20. You can learn more about her work at thepastrevealed.co.uk. ELSE CHUBCHILL As the genealogist at the Society of Genealogists, Else is a well-known expert in many fields. She looks at the records generated by guilds and freemen in this month's ‘Focus On’ (page 29).…

More than 5.5 million family history records from the US state of Connecticut are available on a new free website, Connecticut Genealogy (connecticutgenealogy.org). The site has searchable indexes of 576,638 births (1897-1917), 2,180,700 marriages (1897-2017), 2,086 civil unions (2005-2010) and 2,772,116 deaths (also 1897-2017). Connecticut Genealogy was set up by Reclaim the Records (reclaimtherecords.org), a US nonprofit organisation that campaigns to put family history records in the public domain, which obtained the indexes using Freedom of Information requests. The site's search facility features tools including automatic nickname and partial-name searches, wildcard searches, automatic typo or lettertransposition searches, and daterange searches to the exact day, designed to make it easier for family historians to find records of their ancestors in the state. The site holds records of many famous people. For…

The first witness to the 1666 Great Fire of London has been identified by an academic. Kate Loveman, professor of early modern literature and culture at the University of Leicester, identified Thomas Dagger in research carried out on behalf of the Museum of London as it prepares to open a new site in Sm.thfie.d in 2026. The fire started on 2 September 1666 and destroyed 13,200 homes. Contemporary accounts state that the fire was discovered at Thomas Farriner's bakery on Pudding Lane, with Farriner's “man” raising the alarm. Prof Loveman used letters, pamphlets, and legal and guild records to name the man as Dagger, a journeyman baker.…

Standing against the wall in the churchyard of St John the Baptist, in the delightful small town of New Alresford near Winchester, are five headstones. Nothing unusual about that, you would think. But these are very special headstones - indeed, I think they are perhaps unique in this country, for the carved text is in somewhat abbreviated French. If I am wrong and there are other examples, please email wdytyaeditorial@onrmedia.co.uk and let us know! Four of the headstones are those of French prisoners of war, while the fifth commemorates the wife of another prisoner. They were captured during the Napoleonic Wars, just over two centuries ago, and brought to England to enjoy an honourable captivity - a privilege reserved for officers, not ordinary fighting men. I have known about the…

1844 The 1844 Poor Law Amendment Act and the 1845 Bastardy Act empower mothers to apply to pettysessions courts for maintenance money from the father of their illegitimate child. 1857 The Matrimonial Causes Act makes it possible to petition for a divorce in civil courts, so the process is newly accessible to middle-class women. 1860 Florence Nightingale establishes the world's first secular nursing school at St Thomas’ Hospital, London, making the profession more respectable for women. 1868 The first British women to gain a university education are admitted to the University of London following a nationwide campaign to improve women's access to further education. 1876 The Medical Act allows women to be licensed to practise medicine for the first time, and register with the General Medical Council of Britain. 1882…

ANCESTRY w ancestry.co.uk/search/collections/1129 Christine traced her forebears through slave registers kept on Barbados; copies are at The National Archives in Kew and in Ancestry's collection ‘Former British Colonial Dependencies, Slave Registers, 1813-1834’. TNA's online research guides to slave owners and slavery are at tinyurl.com/tna-slavery. BARBADOS GENEALOGY w facebook.com/groups/104424767995 Joining this Facebook group introduced Christine to Sandra Taitt-Eaddy, a Barbados-born genealogist and historian who now lives in the USA. She helped Christine decipher her great great grandfather's identity, and can be contacted via bajanancestry@gmail.com. BARBADOS GENEALOGY AND SOCIAL HISTORY w facebook.com/groups/1607107876011277 This useful Facebook group has about 11,000 members.…

1 HENRY BAYNES The freedom of the city is granted by the lord mayor. In 1731/1732 this was Henry Baynes, who is recorded here as “2nd time Lord Mayor”. 2 SIMPSON WM William Simpson has gained his freedom having served as an apprentice joiner to Thomas Dickinson. 3 SHIPTON THOMAS Cow-keeper Thomas Shipton has gained the freedom of the City of York by redemption, ie he bought it. 4 SMITH MATTHIAS Matthias Smith, linen weaver, has gained his freedom by patrimony: he is the son of a freeman named Matthew Smith. 5 STOTT ROBERT Robert Stott, soap boiler, did not fulfil the usual requirements to become a freeman but was granted it “by order”, ie gifted it by order of the city's mayor and aldermen.…

Q I have a photo of my ancestor Frederick Hardy (born 1880). Can you identify his uniform? Lynn Reesor A This is a studio photograph of a trooper in the 10th Hussars probably taken around 1900. Hussars were originally light cavalry but, by the late 19th century, were treated as general cavalry, though they maintained traditional Hussar uniforms. This creates a problem with identifying individual Hussar regiments, because their uniforms have only minor distinctions. There were 13 regiments; the 3rd Hussars had red collars and the 13th white, so we can discount them; we can also discount the 11th Hussars because they had scarlet britches. Thankfully the plume on his headgear identifies Fred's regiment as the 10th Hussars and we can provide a rough date too, because a man born…

CELEBRATING YOUR DISCOVERIES Katherine Cobb's guide to wills and probate in the June issue of WDYTYA? Magazine struck a chord with Natasha Ellakirk. The kinds of sources mentioned have provided a breakthrough with her Marsh family of Belper in Derbyshire. Here Natasha reveals how she nailed down the correct ancestors from a range of candidates. MY BRICK WALL The story begins with my 4x great grandfather John Marsh who lived in Belper. He worked as a “smith” and married Mary Anne Bunting in around 1823. They had five children including Abraham, my 3x great grandfather, who became a furnace man and iron puddler. John died in 1838 at the age of 37, and the informant was Thomas Marsh, of Long Row, Belper. The cause of death was inflammation of the…

AROUND BRITAIN AROUND BRITAIN We last paid a visit to the region in April 2020 a few months after the archive service had completed its move to new premises, leaving behind the former headquarters Shire Hall. This time there's the promise of newly digitised county-wide parish registers on the horizon. The county includes historic Cambridgeshire, the former county of Huntingdonshire and the Isle of Ely - built on a Kimmeridge Clay island that looks out over the Fens. The area has been well-served by family and local historians for decades, and Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire Family History Society (chfhs.org.uk) has now transcribed all parish registers, available on CD or to download. The registers are also being digitised by Ancestry (ancestry.co.uk) - earlier this year the company's staff spent six months at the…

BURLING This name is associated with Cambridgeshire, Essex and Kent. COLLEN Collen could be described as the Cambridgeshire variant of the surname Collin/Collins. DOGGETT This is a variant of the surname Duckett. FEW More than 100 Fews were recording living in the village of Willingham in the 1881 census. FROHOCK This locative name is thought to come from Frowick Hall in St Osyth, Essex. HUMAN Human comes from the Middle English personal name Hugheman. It could also be an occupational name meaning ‘servant of Hugh’. ISON Ison is probably a variant of Isham, itself a locative name from Northamptonshire. SHELDRAKE/SHELDRICK Sheldrake is the name for a male shelduck, a white duck with a dark green head, a red bill and a red-brown breast-band. SKEELS From the Middle English word ‘skele’,…

English and British monarchs have been crowned at Westminster Abbey in London since the 11th century, most recently Charles III and Queen Camilla on 6 May. It was a monastery until its dissolution during the, Reformation. The abbey's library and archives don't just hold records relating to figures of huge historical significance, but ‘ordinary’ people as well. Dr Matthew Payne, keeper of the muniments at the abbey, tells us about one such document - a 14th-century roll that records a medieval monk's medical treatment. WHO CREATED THE ROLL? This infirmarer's roll is one of the annual account rolls of one of the senior monks of Westminster Abbey while it was a monastery - that is, before its dissolution in 1540. They were used to record who was admitted to the…

Email wdytyaeditorial@ourmedia.co.uk Write to WDYTYA? Magazine, Eagle House, Bristol BS1 4ST WIN an AncestryDNA test kit from ancestry.co.uk WORTH £79 The writer of our star letter wins an AncestryDNA test worth £79 - so drop us a line and share your thoughts with us. ‘MY ANCESTOR RAN AWAY WITH THE BULLOCKY AND TOOK THE MONEY’ STAR LETTER My mum was born in 1902 in Waiter on the Yorkshire Wolds, and in 1989 she told me that we had an ancestor who “ran away with the bullocky and took the money”. A bullocky was a local term for a cattleman. I thought no more of this comment until 1993 when she died. Realising I didn't know my grandparents, I wanted to find out about my background and the truth behind her story. Mum's…

The chromosome has been fully sequenced, completing the sequencing of the human genome (tinyurl.com/reuters-y-chromsome) 241,830 The number of records that have been added to the collection ‘Gibraltar, Civil Records, 1777-1990’ on free family history website FamilySearch (familysearch.org) 13,975 The number of parish records from Norfolk that have been added to family history website Findmypast (findmypast.co.uk) Alan Turing 17 items belonging to the Bletch ley Park codebreaker, including school reports, his OBE and a letter from George VI, have been returned to the archive at his alma mater Sherborne School after they were stolen by an American woman in 1984 (bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-dorset-66570984)…

1939 REGISTER This record was compiled on 29 September 1939, but amended throughout the 1940s-1990s. When a woman married, her new surname was written above the original entry, therefore it is indexed with both the married and maiden surnames. BIRTH CERTIFICATES If a direct ancestor was born before the start of civil registration but had a younger sibling who was born after 1 July 1837 in England or Wales, then the information recorded on the sibling's birth certificate could reveal their mother's maiden name. DEATH CERTIFICATES Death certificates issued after 1969 record a married woman's maiden surname, plus the place and date of birth - useful for locating earlier birth and marriage certificates. GRO INDEXES Maiden surnames are recorded in the General Register Office's birth indexes at www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content for the…

The Wiltshire OPC Project (https://wiltshire-opc.org.uk/genealogy) began in 2006, and has developed into one of the most successful OPC projects. There is a dedicated group of volunteers, and an active Facebook group that has nearly 2,000 members (facebook.com/groups/wiltsopc/?locale=en_GB). Still regularly updated, the site provides a wide range of transcriptions including inquisitions post mortem, gamekeepers’ certificates for Salisbury, and hair-powder tax certificate listings for Semington dating from 1795. Visitors to the website need to register for a free account. Once logged in, you can access an alphabetical parish listing for your place of interest to see what records have been transcribed so far. There are also web pages Containing genealogy tips, a list of one-name studies, and a database of old postcards from the county that can be claimed by relatives. Teresa…

FOCUS ON GUILDS & FREEMEN The records relating to those who became freemen of guilds and livery companies in the City of London and the provincial (‘outwith’) guilds in other towns and cities around the UK provide a remarkable opportunity to research ancestors’ lives through the 17th and 18th centuries - and earlier in some instances. They show the trades and crafts they practised, the networks of colleagues and employers they associated with, and often their parentage and even spouses. Also freedom of a guild might lead to freedom of the city, whereby one gained the right to vote and to trade in addition to the responsibilities to pay rates and taxes. Most of the guilds had ceased to operate by the late 18th century The guilds provided for their…

ANCESTRY w ancestry.co.uk/search/collections/2052 Here you'll find almost 500,000 admission papers relating to grants of freedom of the City of London. Apprenticeship documents and even birth records are sometimes included. FINDMYPAST w bit.ly/fmp-webb-livery Findmypast has London apprentice abstracts; records of the Ironmongers’, Gunmakers’ and Haberdashers’ Companies; and records for the freedom of the cities of Norwich and York. ROLLCO w londonroll.org Records of London's Livery Companies Online contains details of apprentices and freemen (1400-1900) for companies including the Goldsmiths’ and Stationers’ Companies.…

Dr Angela Smith, co-author of Tracing Your Ancestors Using the UK Historical Timeline (see the subscription offer on page 22) It has been estimated that some 7 per cent of the population were killed during the English Civil War. Tens of thousands of soldiers survived but with wounds, both physical and psychological, while women were widowed and children orphaned. Thousands of petitions were presented to the authorities requesting financial help. Some were awarded a quarterly pension, others a one-off payment. Recipients were recorded in the order books of the courts of quarter sessions and the accounts of county treasurers. The website Civil War Petitions (www.civiiwarpetitions.ac.uk) is produced by a team of academics, and contains petitions and lists of recipients and associated material, making it a treasure trove of detail about ordinary…

1 REGIMENT Hart's Army List is organised by regiment, and includes such information as the location of its battalions, former regiments, militia and volunteer battalions attached, and the battle honours awarded. 2 SENIOR OFFICERS The senior officers are recorded with short biographies. The two colonels are honorary colonels, while the lieutenant colonels command the battalions. Officers’ respective battalions, 1st or 2nd, are indicated by a “1” or “2” against their name throughout the page. 3 JUNIOR OFFICERS The junior officers from majors down to second lieutenants (formerly ensigns) are also named. Officers’ special role in the battalion or absent on special duties are indicated in italics, for example “at Staff College” or “Station Staff Officer, Kussowli”. 4 DATES This column reveals the dates of their first commission and later promotions. A man of the…

Q This photograph was found among my maternal grandmother's papers. It measures 6V2 x 4M inches. Her family came from Gosport, Hampshire, and included a few naval men. The photographer, WC Harvey, was at 124 High Street until around 1903, and then 31 High Street. There is a reprint number, 9122, on the back. Can you date the photo? Hazel Irwin A This family group portrait was taken in a studio. Online sources confirm that WC Harvey was a prolific Gosport photographer working from 124 and 31 High Street in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The dimensions reveal this to be a cabinet card/portrait - a standard format originating in the 1860s, but mainly fashionable between the 1880s and cl910. Dominating late Victorian and Edwardian photography, cabinet prints…

Evelyn Sharp was one of nine surviving children of a slate merchant's family living in Weston Turville in Buckinghamshire. She had no higher education, but spent her time educating herself. At the age of 24 she let home for London, where she lived in a women's hostel in Store Street in Bloomsbury. Sharp was teaching most of the day in schools as well as coaching private pupils, and in the evenings wrote in her curtained cubicle. Her writing found favour and soon she was moving in the set around The Yellow Book, an iconic arts and literature magazine. She wrote books like At the Relton Arms (John Lane, 1895), about middle-class girls trying to find their place in the modern world; the novel is freely available from the Internet Archive…

ENGLAND AND WALES Visit the Government's website Find a Will at probatesearch.service.gov.uk to download a will or probate record back to 1858 for £1.50. For earlier wills, see The National Archives’ research guide at tinyurl.com/tna-pre-1858. IRELAND The National Archives of Ireland in Dublin (https://www.nationalarchives.ie) and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (tinyurl.com/pub-rec-ni) hold old Irish wills. Irish will indexes are on Ancestry (ancestry.co.uk). SCOTLAND Search for wills and testaments from 1513-1925 at the government site ScotlandsPeople (scotlandspeople.gov.uk). It's free to research if you visit the National Records of Scotland in Edinburgh (nrscotland.gov.uk).…

1621 Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden arrives in England. He will eventually be involved in draining and transforming vast marshes into workable land, including in Cambridgeshire. 1628 Oliver Cromwell is elected as one of the two borough MPs for Huntingdon, the town of his birth. He becomes Lord Protector in December 1653. 1661 Isaac Newton begins studying at Trinity College, the University of Cambridge, graduating in 1665. He publishes his ground-breaking Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematical in 1687. 1762 The Tory newspaper the Cambridge Chronicle is founded as a weekly. It absorbs its rival, the Cambridge Journal, in 1766. 1869 Emily Davies and Barbara Bodichon found Girton College, the UK's first residential institution offering university-level education to women. The University of Cambridge grants Girton full college status in 1948. 1882 Jack Hobbs is…

WOMWN'S HISTORY CONFINEMENT THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF MATERNAL BODIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN Jessica Cox The History Press, 320 pages, £25 From conception to afterbirth, the process of pregnancy and childbirth in 19th-century Britain is explored in this wellresearched book. Jessica Cox, a senior lecturer in English literature at Brunel University, London, examines medical texts, advice literature and personal practices from the elite to the poorest of women to paint a picture of the wide variety of maternal experiences. Royal sources shed light on Queen Victoria's childbirths and those of princesses. The voices of the poorest women are harder to collect, but their plight was documented in workhouse records, and cases of infanticide are found in the court records and newspaper reports. In some of the saddest tales, women gave birth in…