Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2026 i Who Do You Think You Are?

Rosemary Collins reports on the latest data releases and genealogy news Tracing ancestors who served in the Royal Navy is easier than ever after five major sets of records of sailors, ships and submarines were published on family history website Findmypast (findmypast.co.uk). The exclusive records were added as part of Findmypast's partnership with the National Museum of the Royal Navy. The five new sets include: ‘British Royal Navy Casualty Logs, 1939-1945’ (100,000 records); ‘British Royal Navy Submarine Movement Cards’ (40,000 records); ‘British Women's Royal Naval Service Enrolment Forms, 1917–1919’ (6,000 records); ‘Royal Naval Division Records, 1916–1919’ (4,500 records); and ‘British and Allied Warships Lost in WWII, 1939–1945’ (420 records, cannot be searched by names). At the start of the First World War, the British Navy was the largest in the…

Family history website Ancestry (ancestry.co.uk) has added a new collection of 351,715 student records from University College London (UCL), dating from 1828 to 1954. UCL was founded in 1826 and opened its doors to students in 1828. It was intended to be an alternative to Oxford and Cambridge, particularly by providing higher education to students from less well-off backgrounds, and was known as the ‘godless institution in Gower Street’ because it was Britain's first secular university. The records include the names of famous people who have studied at UCL. For example, Francis Crick (1916-2004), the co-discoverer of DNA, noting that he graduated with a BSc in 1937 and was admitted to take a PhD in 1938. UCL was also the first university in England to enrol female students. Its first…

1 Check for errors Click ‘Check for errors’ on the profile page, or access the menu from the list view or tree rating. 2 View potential errors Tree Checker has identified two possible errors to be reviewed – a potential duplicate, and a date discrepancy. 3 Check duplicates Review the duplicates in the comparison box. In this case they were two different relations, so I marked them as “Not a duplicate”.…

Charts and Reports provides other ways of publishing and sharing research. There are four reports: Descendancy (lists a person's descendants, moving forwards in time from an ancestor), Ahnentafel (lists ancestors, moving backwards), Register (assigns numbers to track descendants by family groups and birth order) and Family Group Sheet (focuses on a set of parents and their children). Profile pictures are included but you can't add extra photos. Reports can be printed out or exported as a PDF, you can adjust the number of generations and choose from four designs, and an expanded interactive fan view shows up to seven generations of direct ancestors.…

The Shared Match tool can be used in combination with the coloured labels for sorting your DNA matches into clusters of people who share a common ancestor. Grouping in this way helps you to identify which part of your tree to focus on to determine the connections. Enhanced Shared Matches allows you to not only see how much DNA you share with your matches, but it also shows how much DNA your matches share with each other and their predicted relationships to one another. This makes it much easier to identify your matches and work out how they fit into your tree. You can sort the Enhanced Shared Matches by your own close-to-distant matches, or by viewing your matches’ close-to-distant matches. The threshold for Shared Matches is 20 cM, but…

Laura Olmsted's life changed forever in 2018 when she took an AncestryDNA (ancestry.co.uk/dna) test for fun. “To my shock, I discovered that the man who raised me was not my biological father,” says Laura, who lives in Illinois, USA. “Solving my own case opened the door to discovering my talent for interpreting DNA results and resolving misattributed parentage.” Laura and a small group of friends began advising people in their online genealogy communities. “Helping others quickly became a passion. At the time, adoptees, donor-conceived individuals and people experiencing a DNA surprise often had no affordable resources for identifying biological parents. We eventually formalised our efforts as a nonprofit organisation DNAngels (dnangels.org), because it became clear that this work was bigger than any one of us.” Like Laura, many family historians…

Q My 3x great grandfather, John Hodges, married Sarah Turner on 20 February 1799 in Kettering when he was a Corporal in the Royal Regiment of Horse Guards. His son, also John, was born on 20 January 1801. There's no information on John senior after 1801 and his wife remarried in 1802. I can't find a death record for him. Kerry Hodges A Military records for this period give little information on ordinary soldiers and you were fortunate to find his marriage document giving his regiment, rank and a date. There's a Muster Book for Royal Horse Guards at The National Archives (TNA) covering 1793 to 1803, under reference WO 12/57. This is a bulky and not obviously organised document, but I did find references to John and, in particular…

The 1911 census, unlike previous censuses, asked the public: “If any person included in this Schedule is ‘Totally Deaf’ or ‘Deaf and Dumb’”. Previous censuses had grouped health information together and the resulting data isn't included in the main census databases, making it difficult to research those who were deaf. In 2022-3, deaf children and young people at Westgate Community Primary School and King Edward VI School in Bury St Edmunds took part in a project exploring the life of a local man – Walton Burrell (1863-1944). Walton was deaf, but he travelled the world and taught himself photography, taking many pictures of life in Suffolk. However, Walton had access to more opportunities than many other deaf people at the time because he was independently wealthy. A follow-up project was…

Joan Carter's most memorable war stories centred on her time working in the NAAFI canteens. Her favourite involved her supervisor, who had taken a serious dislike to her, ordering her to shine the floor again despite the fact that Joan had just finished it. Through gritted teeth, Joan repeated the task, buffing the floor to such an extent that when her supervisor reappeared she landed squarely on her bottom. “That'll teach her!” Joan said with great satisfaction. Joan was stationed at Fort Brockhurst in Gosport – one of thousands of women who joined the Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes (NAAFI) during the Second World War. Established in December 1920 by the British government, the NAAFI was dedicated to the welfare and morale of Britain's armed forces. Closely aligned with…

The Aluminium Corporation was established in the Conwy Valley in 1907, using hydroelectric power from reservoirs in Snowdonia (Eryri). An additional hydroelectric plant was built at Dolgarrog in 1924. The following year, on 2 November, the corporation's dam across part of Llyn Eigiau burst, and the subsequent flash flood killed 16 locals. Conwy Archives holds the company's archives which include photographs, marketing material, as well as staff records. Archives Hub has a good introduction at tinyurl.com/arch-hub-alum-corp, while the service's online catalogue is at calmview.conwy.gov.uk/calmview/.…

REMEMBRANCE Simon Fowler Amberley, 320 pages, £22.99 Over a century has passed since the guns fell silent in 1918, and 80 years since the end of the Second World War in 1945. Yet, both World Wars remain in our consciousness today. Not least is the legacy of the colossal loss of life, which we commemorate through visits to our cities’ cenotaphs, the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior in London's Westminster Abbey, and war memorials at home and abroad. Many servicemen who did not return from war simply vanished. Whether their remains were lost in the muddy battlefields of the First World War or vaporised by the increasingly destructive weapons of the Second World War, their anguished loved ones were left to mourn them without known graves. Simon Fowler's Known Unto…

American Ancestors publishes Kentucky slavery records Family history website American Ancestors has published a database of 26,456 records of enslaved people in Kentucky before and after the abolition of slavery in 1865. The database (americanancestors.org/search/databasesearch/3867/kentucky-enslaved-church-records-project) consists of records from 28 Catholic parishes in Kentucky, including baptism, marriage and burial records. It is part of 10 Million Names, a project to recover the names of the estimated 10 million people of African descent who were enslaved in America. National Library Scotland adds more maps of Britain The National Library of Scotland has added 354 printed maps of Britain and Ireland to its free maps website (maps.nls.uk), dating from the 1570s to the 1960s. The collection includes 67 maps of Great Britain and Ireland, 76 maps of England and Wales, 12 maps…

We all have photos in our family archives of people who are not direct relations but played an important part in the lives of our ancestors. My uncle, Gerald Cruwys, who sadly died in the Second World War, was based for much of the war at RAF Tempsford near Sandy, Bedfordshire, the secret airfield that was the home of the Moonlight Squadrons tasked with dropping off Special Operations Executive agents and supplies into occupied Europe. Gerry sent the above photo to his family. He is on the back row, seventh from the left, and has marked his fellow crew members with crosses. I've always wanted a way to identify his colleagues, and share this picture with their families. The new Networks feature, part of Pro Tools on Ancestry (ancestry.co.uk), may…

Tree Mapper provides a visual display of the locations of the people in your tree. The default setting shows the locations for events relating to every individual. The Map Filters can be used to customise the maps. You can, for example, filter by surname, location, date or event. Tree Mapper works in tandem with MyTreeTags, so if you've been using tags in your tree you can filter by tags such as ‘DNA Match’ or ‘Direct Ancestor’. If you're using the Networks feature then you can use the Network Map and add all the people in the network to the map. There were a few problems with the geocoding, however. For example, County Kerry was moved to Northern Ireland.…

The Smart Filters provide extra tools for navigating your family tree. The options are currently somewhat limited, particularly compared with the extensive search customisation offered by dedicated family tree programmes. However, if you use Ancestry as your primary tree-building platform or you have a large tree then you will find the filters invaluable. You can currently filter search results by direct-line ancestors, paternal line, maternal line, end of line, and people without relationships. The ‘Events’ and ‘Places’ filters allow you to refine searches by specific locations and events such as births, marriages and deaths. You can use the filters, for example, to search for all events in a specific parish, and even refine the timeframe of the search. The filters are particularly useful when new record sets are added. For…

One of the most poignant cases Laura has worked on is that of John Clauson, who always knew he was adopted. He was deeply loved by his adoptive parents, but carried a lifelong curiosity about where he came from. An only child, he often wondered what traits he'd inherited from his birth parents and whether he had any brothers or sisters. John had taken a DNA test years earlier, but had more or less forgotten about it. “A DNA match from Scotland later messaged him on Ancestry and suggested he contact DNAngels. He'd already identified his birth mother through court records and an intermediary, but she had essentially disappeared – no one knew what had become of her,” Laura says. “John's paternal side was a classic ‘DNA-only’ challenge – no…

There are a number of free options at your fingertips if you've only just begun researching your family history. ‘Getting started’ guides are all over the place, from the polished pages of the Society of Genealogists (sog.org.uk/education/learning-hub/guides-tips/how-to-start-your-family-tree/), to the dated but beloved GENUKI (genuki.org.uk/gs). Once you're ready to begin digging, there are free resources that can help you track down genealogical building blocks such as civil registrations, census entries and transcribed pages of parish registers, sometimes with free-to-view original documents alongside. Don't forget that established subscription websites – such as Ancestry (ancestry.co.uk), Findmypast (findmypast.co.uk) and TheGenealogist (thegenealogist.co.uk) – regularly offer free trial periods, although you'll need a debit or credit card to sign up, and can often be accessed for free at your local library. Library access does have some…

1 ELIZABETH This document records the wishes of “Elizabeth Young or Foster”; Young is her maiden name and Foster her married name. Both surnames will be recorded, and both will be indexed. 2 KILMARNOCK The introductory clause notes that Elizabeth's documents were produced for the confirmation hearing in Kilmarnock on 22 December 1906. 3 INVENTORY The estate inventory often follows the introductory clause; in this case the inventory is accessible in a separate Scotland's People document. It confirms the value of Elizabeth's estate as £320 17s 10d, including rent owed by named tenants. 4 TRUST Elizabeth's wishes have been outlined in a “Trust Disposition and Settlement”, with her estate placed into a trust for her beneficiaries. 5 FAMILY Details of family relationships can be very useful. 6 EXECUTORS Towards the end, Elizabeth nominates her executors, but…

Q My grandfather, Joseph Devlin, was born in the Newry Workhouse in 1910, yet recent DNA results show no biological connection to the 14-year-old named as his mother, Lizzie Devlin, on his birth certificate. Every official document we have – birth, army and marriage – lists Lizzie as his mother, yet genetically he appears to have no link at all to the Devlin family line. His father was unknown and he was given to another couple, who both later died. From there, he was sent to St Patrick's Industrial School in Belfast. He was injured during the Second World War and died just before his 44th birthday. Now, with DNA seemingly proving he was not biologically a Devlin, how do I find out more? Wayne Devlin A Thank you for…

A group of women race down Bertram Road in Roath, Cardiff, flipping pancakes, on 15th February 1961. The Over 40s race shown here was organised by the St Agnes Women Fellowship in aid of Congo Relief A crowd-lined street, terraced houses pressing in on either side, and a pack of women charging towards the camera, aprons flying, frying pans clutched like Olympic batons, wearing sensible shoes and cardigans. Their expressions range from fierce concentration to barely contained laughter. Behind them, men, children and pensioners line the pavements, leaning from doorways, smiling as if this were the highlight of the week - which, very likely, it was. Street races were once a staple of local festivities across Britain. Gala days, jubilees and charity fundraisers all needed entertainment that cost little and…

Travelling through North Wales reveals a landscape where industrial heritage, from the slate quarries of Snowdonia to the coal mines of Wrexham, sits alongside centuries of rural tradition. The area encompasses Anglesey, Conwy, Gwynedd, Denbighshire, Flintshire and Wrexham, although boundaries have shifted over time. The preserved (ceremonial) county of Clwyd, created in 1974 and abolished in 1996, still provides a useful reference point for researchers, even though modern unitary authorities don't always follow historic county lines. This means that records for a single family might be scattered across several repositories. Parish registers, for example, may have been assigned to archives based on old deanery boundaries, rather than with the counties that you'd expect. Blaenau Ffestiniog grew to become the “slate capital of the world” This might sound complicated, but parish…

ARCHIVES & LIBRARIES Anglesey Archives a Industrial Estate Road, Bryn Cefni Industrial Estate, Llangefni, Anglesey LL77 7JA t 01248 751930 e archifdyarchives@ynysmon.gov.uk w anglesey.gov.uk/archives The service looks after census returns, parish and nonconformist records, school material, newspapers, quartersessions records (1772–1884), as well as crew lists for ships registered at Beaumaris. You can explore some digitised images via People's Collection Wales: peoplescollection.wales/users/44461. Conwy Archives a Conwy Culture Centre, Town Ditch Road, Conwy LL32 8NU t 01492 577550 e archifau.archives@conwy.gov.uk w conwyculture.com/about-culture/archives Alongside census, parish and school material, the archive has a range of court records on microfilm for Caernarfonshire (1611–1876), on CD-Rom for Denbighshire (1706–1800), plus records of petty sessions. Gwynedd Archives Service a Caernarfon Record Office, Cyngor Gwynedd, Caernarfon LL55 1SH t 01286 679095 a Meirionnydd Record Office, Cyngor Gwynedd,…

DEBBIE KENNETT Debbie usually writes for us on DNA, but this month she looks at an Ancestry add-on tool that offers subscribers some benefits that don't just apply to DNA testing (see page 14). NICOLA MORRIS Nicola is the director of Timeline Research Ireland and works with the TV series on Irish stories. On page 28 she shares tips on how she researched Aisling Bea's teacher ancestor. CHRIS PATON Based in Ayrshire, Chris runs a genealogy research service (www.scotlandsgreateststory.co.uk) that specialises in Scottish and Irish records. On page 38 he looks at Scottish wills.…

Email wdytyaeditorial@ourmedia.co.uk to feature your event here for free PICK OF THE MONTH Don't miss the latest online Scottish Indexes Conference Scottish Indexes Conference XXXI 31 January w scottishindexes.com/conference.aspx The Scottish Indexes Conference was first launched during the covid lockdown and has since gone from strength to strength. Each conference offers a day of online talks by leading experts in Scottish genealogy. The latest programme of talks includes ‘How Did My Scottish Ancestors Get Married?’ by Tahitia McCabe, about the different historical forms of Scottish marriage; ‘Dive Deeper Into Scottish Church Records’ by Alison Spring, about Catholic, Presbyterian and nonconformist records in Scotland; ‘The Edinburgh Public Dispensary, Patients and Doctors’ by Daisy Cunynghame, about a new website of historic medical records; and ‘Taking the High Road’ by Andrew Armstrong, about…

New historical research has traced the lives of people living in Birmingham almshouses in the 19th and 20th centuries. Professor Nicholas Crowson and Dr Jacob Fredrickson of the University of Birmingham went through the records of Birmingham's Bournville Almshouse Trust and Lench's Trust and used genealogical records such as censuses to trace the almshouse residents. Their research can be read for free on tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14780038.2025.2550071#d1e1249. They found that some residents received a high standard of care while others did not. For example, when Emma Tutin died in 1920 aged 93, after living at the Bournville Almshouse since its opening in 1899, her friends wrote to the trustees to thank them for the “grand privilege”, particularly thanking the superintendent Emily Lees “who with her own hands ministered with loving care to our…

Tree Checker can be used to check for errors in your family tree, find duplicates, and identify people with no sources or where the only source is another person's family tree. You need at least 50 people in your tree to activate the feature. Ancestry now gives you a rating for your tree based on the error rate, so the more issues you fix the higher the rating. I found that the tree rating acted as a helpful incentive to correct errors and add more sources to my tree. Tree ratings can only be seen by you and other tree editors. You can check for errors from the individual profile pages, via the list view or by clicking on your tree rating. Tree Checker can be used in combination with…

This feature provides four reports listing the top five surnames in your tree, the five oldest people, the five women with the most children, and the five people who were married at the youngest age. The surnames report links to online extracts from the Dictionary of American Family Names (second edition, 2022). There's also a map showing the distribution of the surnames in the 1891 census. The age at marriage report turned out to be a valuable tool for identifying errors, picking up a few typos where I had people marrying at impossibly young ages.…

I am using Networks to research the men who served with my uncle Gerald Cruwys, who was an RAF navigator in the Second World War. We have a family archive of photos and documents, and I have transcriptions from RAF Operations Record Books. The Networks feature is a useful way of publishing, sharing and preserving my research. I've created a network called Tempsford Crew for my research into RAF Tempsford where Gerry flew on top-secret missions with 161 Squadron. He later moved to 635 Squadron where he joined the elite Pathfinder Force. I have created another network called Mansbridge Lancaster Crew where I'm researching the seven men who died with my uncle on 20 April 1944 when their plane was shot down by a Nazi nightfighter.…

The Penal Laws of the 1690s restricted the ability of Irish Catholics to access education by prohibiting the establishment of Catholic schools. Catholic children were instead taught in informal schools, often situated outside, known as hedge schools. Although the penal laws were relaxed in the late 18th century, hedge schools persisted and the third Royal Commission of Inquiry into Education in Ireland, which sat between 1825 and 1827, found that about 350,000 Catholic children were being educated, largely in hedge schools. The lengthy appendix to the second report of the commission is a list, gathered from returns made by the local Catholic and Protestant clergy, detailing more than 11,000 schools, including hedge schools. Over 12,000 teachers, employed in 1824, were enumerated alongside a description of their school. If your ancestor…

1 Name The surname and first name(s) of the teacher are recorded. The list is in alphabetical order by surname. 2 Age The teacher's age is given. For example, Sara West, age 34 years 5 months in March 1905, was born around November 1870. 3 Service This column records the length of service as a National School teacher, again in years and months. Sara had been employed for 12 years 8 months, suggesting she qualified around July 1892. 4 Places Of Education Sara was educated at “Stranafaley” near the town of Brookeborough. Stranafeley is a townland in County Fermanagh and Form B1 of the census confirms a school at this address, suggesting Sara's area of origin. 5 Training College The name of the training college, if attended, is listed. This page includes “Our Lady of…

Following an individual's death in Scotland, the civil courts had a process known as ‘confirmation’, the equivalent of ‘probate’ in England, Wales and Ireland, through which an executor could be appointed to settle any outstanding debts to creditors, to collect outstanding sums owed to the deceased, and to dispose of the person's movable estate. If the deceased died ‘testate’, meaning that he or she had left a will, then a court document issued to the executor would be known as a ‘testament testamentar’, the equivalent of a ‘grant of probate’ in the rest of the UK. If the deceased died without a will, being ‘intestate’, then the executor was granted a ‘testament dative’, the equivalent of a ‘letter of administration’ or ‘admon’ in other jurisdictions. The majority of wills were…

Q I have links to Rissa Montgomery, born about 1035 or 1040 to Roger Hiemes Montgomery and Josceline de Beaumont or Mabel Talvas. She appears to have been married to: 1 Roger de Montgomery, who was mother to Livida de Meriet (born 1069). 2 Eadnoth The Constable (Staller) who was mother to Harding FitzEadnoth (born 1058). But Harding FitzEadnoth married Livida de Meriet his half-sister. This, surely cannot be correct. Ann Shaw A Knowing years of birth for anyone in the 11th century is rare, but programmes for creating computerised pedigrees often demand a birth year, even when one is not known: the ones here and the incorrect name ‘Roger Hiemes Montgomery’ make me suspect your information is from online family trees, hence your finding of a married couple appearing…

Edward Jenner developed the world's first vaccine in 1796, when he inoculated a young boy against smallpox with pus collected from a cowpox sore on a milkmaid in Berkeley, Gloucestershire. In the 19th century, vaccination spread as a way of immunising children against previously devastating diseases – although then, as now, vaccination was sometimes subject to conspiracy theories and resistance. The library of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow holds the records of a pioneering vaccination programme in the city in the early 19th century, as library and heritage manager Clare Harrison explains. WHAT IS THE REGISTER? The register is the first in a series of 15 volumes that together record the patient details of all those who took part in the smallpox vaccination programme run by…

BBC iPlayer Streaming now Richard Osman's bestselling The Thursday Murder Club novels – about a group of amateur sleuths investigating unsolved murders – have delighted millions of readers around the world, and the first book was recently made into a Netflix film. In his episode of Who Do You Think You Are? Osman discovered that his own ancestors helped to solve a 19th-century murder investigation in a similar way. The concept of a ‘Murder Club’ has its origins in a ‘Crime Club’ formed by Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle in the Edwardian age. Now, TV historian Lucy Worsley wants to assemble her own club to solve one of the most gruesome cases of the Victorian age – the ‘Thames Torso Murders’. Between 1887 and 1889, four women were murdered…