Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2024 i Who Do You Think You Are?

When we launched Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine in 2007, I remember talking to someone prominent in the world of family history who said that we would never reach a point where all parish registers in the UK were digitised, because there were just too many of them. Now, allthough we are still a long way from seeing every register digitised, it certainly doesn't look like an impossible task. On page 14 we explain what has been digitised and put online, and where you need to search to find your family in the records. Parish register collections are scattered across numerous websites, so we have put this guide together to help you locate the baptisms, marriages and burials that mark a life lived. We also have a touch…

Email wdytyaeditorial@ourmedia.co.uk Write to WDYTYA? Magazine, Eagle House, Bristol BS1 4ST RECORDING THE PRESENT… TO EXPLORE THE PAST… FOR THE FUTURE I started recording members of my family in the hope of picking up family information and for prosperity. I was inspired to do this when I heard the voice of Florence Nightingale recorded when she was an elderly lady. I bought a cheap, easy-to-use voice recorder for this purpose, but smartphones can do the same thing. I gathered together many questions from online ideas that I could ask to help me to get the person being interviewed talking. “Tell me about your school”, “What was your childhood house like?”, “Tell me what your father was like”, “What was your wedding day like for you?”, “Do you remember the moon landings?”…

Research has revealed that the world-conquering pop star and her boyfriend, American football player Travis Kelce, are 10th cousins once removed (tinyurl.com/wdytya-swift) 78% The proportion of UK heritage organisations that are currently experiencing costs or budget pressures, according to a new survey (tinyurl.com/mus-heritage -surv) 62,569 The number of records that have been added to the collection ‘England & Wales, Crime, Prisons & Punishment, 1770–1935’ on Findmypast (findmypast.co.uk) BRCA NHS England is offering free testing for faults on the genes BRCA1 and BRCA2, which are associated with a higher risk of some forms of cancer, to anyone in England with at least one Jewish grandparent (jewishbrca.org)…

Nicola recommends these three websites for sourcing Irish newspapers BRITISH NEWSPAPER ARCHIVE w britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk This subscription website includes digitised Irish newspapers held by the British Library, and is slightly better for early material than the Irish Newspaper Archives. IRISH NEWSPAPER ARCHIVES w irishnewsarchive.com Another subscription site, this offers more than six million newspaper pages back to 1738, including a large regional component and a number of radical titles. NATIONAL LIBRARY OF IRELAND w nli.ie The library's online catalogue lists the newspapers in its collection. Hyperlinks to the Irish Newspaper Archives are included if the newspaper in question has been digitised.…

Unfortunately there is a lot of misinformation online when it comes to family names. This is partly because many of the accepted histories of surnames were based on outdated research that was carried out a long time ago. Although the same data we have today was theoretically available to historians 75 years ago, it was simply too overwhelming to tackle in the way that we can now. Armed with computers, surname scholars can sort and compare hundreds of millions of digitised records, analyse patterns, and draw conclusions about each surname's origin and history in a way that simply wasn't possible in the past. And that, ultimately, is the very short version of what powers The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2016). The dictionary,…

1 MRS FRANCES WILLIAMSON With Williamson out modern copying facilities the document's facts all have to be certified in lieu of duplicates of supporting documents. This section dates the initial claim and gives the name of the applicant. 2 RALPH WILLIAMSON The deceased husband's name, rank, regiment, and place and date of death are all given. Note that requests for the widows of more senior officers differ slightly. 3 FINANCIAL STATUS The widow and her two children were in “indifferent circumstances”. The date of the marriage is also given. 4 OATH Frances had to swear an oath confirming her widowhood and financial circumstances. The colonel of the regiment is also named here. 5 JOHN SHAW Certification of the swearing of the oath by the magistrate who witnessed it, giving his name and…

Q Can you identify the regiment my great great uncle, John MacTavish Henry (born 1870), served with? This is the only picture I have of him. Lorraine Janes A This is a sketch, post-1902, of an Australian who'd fought in the Second Boer War (1899–1902) and, probably, in Matabeleland in 1893. I think that it was likely drawn from a poor-quality photo. The uniform is standard British/ Commonwealth/Colonial style for the late 19th century, so the only real clues are the medals, indicating service in the Second Boer War. A search of the AngloBoerWar website (angloboerwar. com) produced a John McLavish (sic) Henry, lance-corporal, number 36789, in the Prince of Wales’ Light Horse (PWLH) volunteer cavalry regiment. His PWLH enrolment form, at The National Archives (TNA), Kew, in WO 126/102,…

CELEBRATING YOUR DISCOVERIES Between 1880 and 1910 an estimated four million Italians migrated to North America, hoping to find a better life. Many were escaping dire poverty in southern Italy, where disease, social chaos and natural disasters such as earthquakes added to their burden. Some Italian migrants worked for a few years in the USA before returning home to their families. Others stayed and became part of the cultural melting pot of modern-day America. Among them were the Carapella family. Audra Carapella CransHenderson tells their story. MY BRICK WALL I have a strong sense of my Italian roots. I always knew that I had something special when we visited my mother's relatives – the Italian language being spoken, the homemade food and wines, the huge extended family. My friends didn't…

AROUND BRITAIN Of all my childhood holidays, it's family trips to the seaside village of Hope Cove five miles west of Salcombe that evoke the happiest memories. The idyllic harbour with its thatched guest houses, together with such picturesque south-coast towns as Torquay, Paignton and Brixham, are what earns this part of the world the nickname of the English Riviera, and tourism still powers much of the county's economy today. Researchers are served by three archives, two administered by the South West Heritage Trust (swheritage.org.uk -the Devon Heritage Centre (DHC) in Exeter (swheritage.org.uk/devon-archives/visit/devon-heritage-centre) and the North Devon Record Office in Barnstaple (swheritage.org.uk/devon-archives/visit/north-devon-records-office) – and a separate record office for Plymouth. The latter now lives in the arts and heritage venue The Box, which opened in 2020 around the time of…

The Missions to Seamen society was founded in 1856 to provide religious support and welfare for sailors. Now known as The Mission to Seafarers, it continues to operate as a charity today (missiontoseafarers.org). The records of The Mission to Seafarers, capturing two centuries of welfare efforts across the world, are held at Hull History Centre, and cataloguing was completed in 2023. Claire Weatherall, an archivist at the centre, shares an item from the collection – the diary of Rev Charles Nibbs, a chaplain in Hull during the First World War. The diary is a fascinating record of daily life in a coastal English town during the war CAN YOU TELL ME THE CHARITY'S ORIGINS? In 1856 a national society, named The Missions to Seamen, was established in London. Affiliated to…

CELEBRATING YOUR DISCOVERIES We got to our camp at about 3am situated at the foot of the lower hills with a beautiful carpet of chamomile, poppies and other wild flowers; after a cup of Oxo we went to bed.” These are the recollections of Violet Constance Guy, who journeyed across the Zagros Mountains in Persia (now Iran) in 1925. She made this journey by mule train, travelling for 24 days to begin a new life. Martyn Guy found out about his great aunt's epic adventure 40 years ago. “My mother Joan showed me a letter that Violet had written to her Aunt Sara,” Martyn explains. “It was 28 pages long, and described the journey across Persia in detail. This was absolute gold dust.” My great aunt was a formidable woman,…

Anyone who has searched online collections of historic newspapers will know that optical character recognition (OCR) can be hit or miss. OCR enables us to search millions of pages from newspapers with the click of a mouse – but, if you notice particular letters are being misread in the title you are searching, then adapt your spellings to match. For example in our ‘Focus On’ on page 29 Nicola Morris suggests typing ‘ff’ instead of ‘ss’ when searching early newspapers.…

A few days before Christmas last year we stayed for a couple of nights in a ‘pub with rooms’ owned by a major landed estate in the Midlands. What a bed we had! It was a proper fourposter, complete with a tester: the rectangular panel that forms the ceiling of the bed. Sometimes you come across slightly absurd imitations of the real thing, beds with flimsy upright posts and swathes of net instead of heavy curtains – but this had thick wooden uprights, built to last. What struck us immediately, though, was the height of the bed and its very deep mattress. The top, the sleeping level, was as high as my chest. There was a little portable set of steps to help with the ascent, but getting into bed…

Growing up in Redesdale, one of life's great pleasures was riding my horse Molly over the sunlit hillsides. The valley is in the idyllic Northumberland National Park, and 10 miles south of the border with Scotland. It's hard to imagine that a few centuries earlier, Redesdale was one of the most violent places in England. This was due to cut-throat marauders known as ‘reivers’ who terrorised the Borders from the 13th century until the 1600s. Our farm was near the hamlet of Rochester, where the site of a Roman fort called Bremenium was excavated. I knew a little of our ancestry – the Dixons had farmed in Redesdale for at least a century, and we had connections with the nearby village of Elsdon. As a child, I used to play…

Rosemary Ffolliot was one of Ireland's most respected and well-known genealogists. Born in 1935 she published her first book The Pooles of Mayfield (1958) at the age of 23, beginning her documentation of the landed families of Cork. Ffolliott became a fellow of the Irish Genealogical Research Society (IGRS), editor of the society's journal The Irish Ancestor and one of the freelance genealogists at the Genealogical Office in Dublin. Renowned for her disciplined and meticulous work, Ffolliott raised the standards of genealogical research in Ireland. She died in 2009. During the course of her work, Ffolliott extracted biographical information from historic Irish newspapers, particularly for families living in the province of Munster in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. These abstracts, organised alphabetically by surname and now online at…

BOOK The History of the Irish Newspaper 1685-1760 Robert L Munter Cambridge University Press, 1967 Munter reveals the origins of the Irish newspaper industry. WEBSITES FINDMYPAST w bit.ly/fmp-ffolliott ‘Irish Newspaper Transcript Archive, Ffolliott Collection 1756–1850’ on Findmypast digitises the indispensable newspaper extracts created by Rosemary Ffolliott. IRISH ANCESTORS w johngrenham.com Click ‘Browse’ in the menu bar then choose ‘Records’ and ‘Newspapers’ for a detailed introduction to the topic. You can also find a list of titles for each county with links to online collections. IRISH GENEALOGICAL RESEARCH SOCIETY w irishancestors.ie You can search a free database of more than 250,000 names mentioned in the society's journal The Irish Genealogist, which launched in 1937. Also, society members can access indexes to births, marriages and deaths featured in newspaper notices.…

FAMILY NAMES OF THE UNITED KINGDOM w www.uwe.ac.uk/research/centres-and-groups/bcl/research/family-names An overview of the research project that led to the publication of The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland in 2016. INTERNATIONAL COUNCIL OF ONOMASTIC SCIENCES w https://icosweb.net/what-is-onomastics/ If you want to know more about the study of proper names, this site is for you. MEDIEVALISTS.NET w medievalists.net Many surnames have medieval roots and this site has articles ranging from the multilingual origins of Irish surnames, to unusual girls’ names. PEOPLE OF MEDIEVAL SCOTLAND w poms.ac.uk If you have Scottish roots, don't miss this consolidated database of names recorded in documents written between 1093 and 1371. PROSOPOGRAPHY OF ANGLOSAXON ENGLAND w pase.ac.uk Search a database of individuals up to the end of the 11th century taken from chronicles, charters,…

ARCHIVE THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES a Kew, Richmond, Surrey TW9 4DU t 020 8876 3444 w nationalarchives.gov.uk TNA's website includes an extremely useful archived research guide to its holdings of early officer records, including families, although the vast majority have not been digitised and can only be viewed during an in-person visit to Kew: tinyurl.com/tna-guide-army-officers. The site also contains Army Lists enabling you to trace an officer's career backwards from death to commission, which you can download as digital microfilm: tinyurl. com/disc-army-lists. WEBSITE WAR WIDOWS’ STORIES w warwidowsstories.org.uk This site has a history of army widows’ pensions, interviews with recent and historical stories, and descriptions of charities and legal changes that assisted them.…

Q In 1832, newspapers across Britain reported on a ‘criminal conversation’ case at the Taunton Assizes. Thomas Garlick of Wickwar, Gloucestershire, was suing a Dr West for having seduced – and run away with – his wife, Lucy Skey Garlick (born 1820), the daughter of Thomas Skey, surgeon. Thomas Garlick won the case and was awarded substantial damages, but what happened to Lucy and who was Dr West? Toni Glasson A No forename was given for Dr West in newspaper reports from 1832, which is before the publication of medical directories in the 1840s. But the reports do contain evidence given by individuals living between the houses occupied by Dr West and Thomas and Lucy Garlick suggesting that they lived near each other in Wickwar. Land Tax records list Thomas…

ANCESTORS PORTAL w antenati.cultura.gov.it/?lang=en View images of birth, marriage and death records via this website from the State Archives of Italy in Rome. You can search the database by area as well as a relation's name. FINDMYPAST w bit.ly/fmp-italians-to-america This collection contains details of nearly one million Italian immigrants who arrived in Baltimore, Boston, New Orleans, New York and Philadelphia between 1855 and 1900. ITALGEN w italiangenealogy.com This free website is a treasure trove of advice for anyone researching their Italian ancestry, and has a very busy forum where members answer one another's queries.…

c55 The leader of the II Augusta legion sets up a fortified camp on the hill above the River Exe. Exeter becomes the westernmost Roman fortress in Britain. 1497 Perkin Warbeck, a royal pretender claiming to be one of the ‘Princes in the Tower’, besieges Exeter. c1540 Explorer and privateer Sir Francis Drake is born in Tavistock, the eldest of 12 sons. A bronze statue of him is unveiled in Plymouth in 1884. 1562 Plymouth-born John Hawkins conducts slave raids on West Africa, taking captured people across the Atlantic to sell in the Caribbean. 1620 The Mayflower leaves Plymouth on 16 September carrying 102 pilgrims and roughly 30 crew. The transatlantic crossing to Cape Cod takes 66 days. 1685 Following the crushing of the Monmouth Rebellion of dissident Protestants, the…

BLACKLER There are spikes of this locative name in Brixham, Ermington, Plymouth and Stoke Damerel in 1881. BOVEY This is another locative name, this time related to Bovey Tracey or North Bovey – which are themselves named after the River Bovey, the largest tributary to the Teign. CHUGG A variant of Chuck, Chugg was most commonly found in Exeter in the 1881 census. DAMERELL This name comes from Aumale (formerly Albemarle) in Seine-Maritime, Normandy, which has become fused with the French preposition de. HANNAFORD There are three places called Hannaford in Devon, which perhaps explains why 1,110 namesakes were living in the county in 1891. LUSCOMBE The 1881 census recorded more than 1,000 Luscombes in Devon. TOOP/TOPE The surnames Tope and Toop crop up across south-west England, Tope most commonly…

JONATHAN SCOTT Every month Jonathan writes our ‘Around Britain’ and ‘Best Websites’ articles, but this month he also tours the web to find online parish registers. Read more on page 14. NICOLA MORRIS Nicola is a consultant genealogist and lecturer in Ireland, and has researched for the Who Do You Think You Are? TV series. On page 29 she shares her Irish newspaper search tips. DR ANGELA BUCKLEY On page 54 crime historian and author Dr Angela Buckley shares her insights on crime and punishment in the Victorian era. Find out more about Angela at drangelabuckley.com.…

ARCHIVE NORTHUMBERLAND ARCHIVES a QEII Country Park, Ashington NE63 9YF t 01670 624358 e archives@northumberland.gov.uk w tinyurl.com/northum-arch Gail found accounts compiled by her 3x great grandfather in 1815 in Northumberland Archives. She was able to order copies, and match his signature with that of his marriage entry. WEBSITES INTERNET ARCHIVE w tinyurl.com/arch-elsd You will find many out-of-print genealogical books freely available in the Internet Archive. The Register of Baptisms, Marriages & Burials Solemnized in the Ancient Parish Church of Elsdon (Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, 1903) was a revelation. It gave the names of the farms where Gail's ancestors lived, which matched with wills and electoral rolls. NORTH EAST INHERITANCE DATABASE w familyrecords.dur.ac.uk/nei/data/intro.php This initiative from Durham University Library includes pre1858 probate records (wills and related documents).…

Q My ancestor Robert Brown, a physician and surgeon, was 50 in the 1851 census and recorded as born in Preston, Lancashire. I think he was the son of Thomas (from Bolton-byBowland, Yorkshire) and Ellen (née Holgate), and baptised in Preston on 14 September 1800. One of his sons had the middle name Holgate, and Robert had been apprenticed to a friend of the family near Skipton, Yorkshire. Thomas and Ellen's other children were baptised in Bolton-byBowland, so why was Robert born in Preston? Hugh Casement A Robert's age and birthplace in the 1851 census have led you to a very promising baptismal record, but is the baptism of Robert Brown at Preston on 14 September 1800 the right one? The fact Robert used Ellen's maiden name Holgate as a…

Q Can you date this image? It isn't an original photo, and has a faded notation “Dimond and Hart Limited” in the bottom-right corner. It's said to be my great great grandparents, William Ramsbottom (born 1851) and Sarah Matthewman (born 1858), who married in Scarborough in 1883. Their eldest child, Madge, my great grandmother, married in Scarborough in 1904. Catherine Hauraki A This is definitely a copy photograph, probably an enlarged version of the original. Photographic copies/enlargements were commonly colour-retouched by hand, to restore any pictorial detail lost in the process, and to render the image more attractive and lifelike, creating a substantial portrait for display at home. Most professional photographers undertook enlarging and retouching, and Dimond and Hart evidently specialised in such work. The blog Early New Zealand Photographers…

TECH TIPS Looking for a new way to showcase your family history online? Treemily (treemily.com) is a dedicated tree-building service with a focus on creating eye-catching prints from your family tree. Everything is accessible through your web browser, and you can easily build your tree from scratch following our step-by-step guide. After you've generated your chart, click ‘Order Print’ where you can see a preview, plus choose type (poster, framed or digital) and size. Digital and posters are priced directly, but framed prints require you to make further choices – such as frame material and paper type – before the final cost is shown. In addition to charging for prints, Treemily also adopts a two-tier subscription system for access to the site. The free ‘Basic’ tier that we feature here…

ARCHIVE THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES a Bessant Drive, Richmond TW9 4DU t 020 8876 3444 w nationalarchives.gov.uk TNA's records include assize trials, calendars of prisoners, and criminal registers. Many are digitised on sites such as Ancestry (ancestry.co.uk) and Findmypast (findmypast.co.uk). BOOKS Criminal Ancestors David T Hawkings Alan Sutton Publishing, 1992 This book can be borrowed for free from the Internet Archive at tinyurl.com/arch-hawkings. Tracing Your Criminal Ancestors Stephen Wade Pen & Sword, 2009 Wade's title is a useful guide. WEBSITES BRITISH NEWSPAPER ARCHIVE w britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk Both national and regional titles reported court cases in detail. DIGITAL PANOPTICON w digitalpanopticon.org This site can help you trace convicts transported to Australia. OLD BAILEY ONLINE w oldbaileyonline.org This newly relaunched website contains searchable transcripts of trials held at London's central criminal court (1674–1913). POLICE…

Many historic records are more accessible than ever, thanks to transcription – the art of typing up the information on old documents to make it available via a database. One of the most successful ways of transcribing records is via crowdsourcing – getting volunteers to work on the records online. In August 2022, Gwent Archives, Glamorgan Archives, and Cardiff University Special Collections and Archives together launched Crowd Cymru, a volunteer project to transcribe their digital collections. It's hosted on a bilingual online platform created by the National Library of Wales (NLW), and the initial tranche was funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. By 30 November 2023, the project's original end date, the volunteer team had successfully transcribed two collections. One is the letters of Edward Thomas (1878-1917), an acclaimed…

DIRECTORIES w tinyurl.com/spe-col-dev You can browse a Kelly's Directory of Devon (1919), alongside volumes covering Exeter, Plymouth and Tavistock, on the site Special Collections Online. PARISH REGISTERS w tinyurl.com/fs-wiki-dev The Devon material on FamilySearch includes parish registers dating from 1538-1912 as well as Bishops’ Transcripts (1558-1887). MEMORIAL INSCRIPTIONS w tinyurl.com/devonfhs-mis You can search and view transcriptions of memorial inscriptions for free on the website of Devon Family History Society. Society members can also see images of gravestones. TITHE MAPS w tinyurl.com/kyp-dev Explore historic maps of the county, including digitised tithe maps, at Know Your Place West of England. WILLS w tinyurl.com/devonfhs-wills Volunteers from Devon Family History Society have created this consolidated index to the county's wills, administrations and inventories.…

LISTEN ALDERNEY: THE HOLOCAUST ON BRITISH SOIL tinyurl.com/bbc-alderney-holocaust Free During the Second World War, thousands of prisoners of almost 30 nationalities were kept on the Channel Island of Alderney as slave labourers by the occupying Nazis. In this Radio 4 documentary, journalist Christine Finn looks at the remains of the prison camps and the ongoing government inquiry into the deaths there. PODCAST MISSING PIECES – NPE LIFE Podcast services Free For some people, a home DNA test turns their world upside down when they experience an NPE, standing for ‘Non Paternity Event’ or ‘Not Parent Expected’. In this podcast, Don Anderson, who discovered that his father wasn't his biological father, interviews people who also made unexpected discoveries via DNA testing. WATCH LEARN WITH LORNA tinyurl.com/yt-lorna Free These YouTube videos from…