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Collins
Tracing Your Family History
Anthony Adolph
How We Are Related
‘Who begot whom is a most amusing kind of hunting’ Horace Walpole
For our friend’s daughter Kim Van Trier, who completed her journey from conception to birth in marginally less time and with considerably less fuss than the writing of this book, and for Scott Crowley, whose quiet support and encouragement throughout have been unfaltering.
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
How We Are Related
Dedication
Introduction
PART ONE Getting Started
CHAPTER ONE Ask The Family
CHAPTER TWO Writing It All Down
CHAPTER THREE Ancestral Pictures
CHAPTER FOUR Before You Begin
PART TWO The Main Records
CHAPTER FIVE General Registration
CHAPTER SIX Censuses
CHAPTER SEVEN The Main Websites
CHAPTER EIGHT Directories & Almanacs
CHAPTER NINE Lives Less Ordinary
CHAPTER TEN Parish Records
CHAPTER ELEVEN Manorial Records
CHAPTER TWELVE Wills
CHAPTER THIRTEEN Gravestones & Memorials
PART THREE Taking It Further
CHAPTER FOURTEEN Newspapers & Magazines
CHAPTER FIFTEEN Land Records
CHAPTER SIXTEEN Slave Ancestry
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Maps & Local Histories
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Records of Elections
CHAPTER NINETEEN The Parish Chest
CHAPTER TWENTY Hospitals & Workhouses
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE What People Did
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Fighting Forbears
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Tax & Other Financial Matters
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR Swearing Oaths
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Legal Accounts
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX Education! Education! Education!
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN Immigration & Emigration
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT Religious Denominations In Britain
PART FOUR Broadening The Picture
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE Genetics
CHAPTER THIRTY What’s In A Name?
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE Royalty, Nobility & Landed Gentry
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO Heraldy
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE Psychics
Useful Addresses
Index
Acknowledgments
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
Long before there were computer programmers and engineers, blacksmiths or even farmers, our ancestors told each other stories of who they were and where they came from. Over time, as other subjects became more important (or at least seemed to be), our ancestral tales began to take a backburner, the older ones blurring into creation myths but the more recent ones remaining important to their tellers and listeners.
When memories started to be written down, one of the first things to be recorded were ancient genealogies, linking the living to their ancient roots. It is for that reason that we can trace the Queen’s ancestry back through the Saxon royal family to their mythological ancestor, the god Woden. Yet for most, the rise of written records heralded a gradual erosion of oral traditions and, in medieval England, memories tended to grow shorter in proportion to the proliferating rolls of vellum and parchment recording our forbears’ deeds, dues and misdemeanours. And then, just as it became apparent to our ancestors that they were losing touch with the past, it crossed people’s minds that these self-same documents, compiled for no better reason than to record land transfer, court cases or tax liability, could help us retrace our past and discover the identities of our forgotten forbears.
My great-great-grandparents, Albert Joseph Adolph and his wife Emily Lydia, née Watson. When I started my research, they were as far back as my grandfather’s memory stretched.
This, the act of tracing family roots through both remembered stories and written records, is genealogy, the subject that has preoccupied most of my life, first as an amateur and later as a professional ever since, as a child, I encountered the pedigrees of elves and hobbits at the back of The Lord of the Rings. And it has been my good fortune that the past few decades have been ones of exceptional growth in genealogy as a pastime across the world, from a minority interest with snobby overtones in the 1960s to a mainstream activity, contributing significantly to the tourist industry and constituting one of the principal uses of the internet. In recent decades, it has broken through, too, into the media.
The author presenting BBC1’s 2007 Gene Detectives with Melanie Sykes.
NEW EDITION
FAMILY HISTORY is enjoying an extraordinarily dynamic phase and much is changing. In the last few years, internet companies have realised the profits to be made by setting up pay-to-view websites, especially covering the two great building blocks of 19th-century family trees, General Registration and census records. The small amounts paid by users fund further indexing work, thus bringing yet more records within far easier reach of more people than ever before.
These sites have truly revolutionised searching. When I wrote the first edition of this book, I would only have sought people in the 1871 census (for example) if I had a precise address, or had no alternative choice. Now, I can search the entire 1871 census online in seconds. I would make one plea, though: if you are new to this, please don’t take these new developments for granted, or grumble at the relatively very small amounts of money being charged. You are at a vast advantage over genealogists in previous generations. Equally, however, pre-internet genealogists did have to get to grips with and understand how these records worked in far more detail, and this tended to make them very good researchers. So, having saved a lot of time thanks to the internet, why not use some of it to read the relevant chapters of this book, so that you can form a more rounded picture of how the original records were created, and where the originals may be found? This edition is as up-to-date as it can be – yet improvements in accessibility occur almost monthly. These are exciting times indeed.
The first year of this millennium saw two series appearing on national television, BBC 2’s Blood Ties and my own series, Extraordinary Ancestors, on Channel 4. These were followed by further series with which I have been privileged to be involved, particularly Living TV’s Antiques Ghostshow and Radio 4’s Meet the Descendants, which have continued to tell stories of genealogical investigation and discovery.
My mother’s great-grandfather, Rev. Patrick Henry Kilduff – one of a treasure trove of old photographs I was given by a distant cousin whom I had traced in the course of my research.
Millions of people, including you, are now actively investigating their origins, or at least thinking about doing so. This complete guide is intended to cover all the topics you will need to know about how to trace your family tree. You can start at the beginning, letting it guide you through the process of getting started and working back through the different types of records which should, given time and patience, enable you to trace your family tree back for hundreds of years. Or, if you are already a genealogist, you can use it as a reference book to identify and learn more about the vast array of different types of source that may be available for your research.
In some respects, this book follows the standards already set out by its predecessors, and I fully acknowledge my enormous debts to genealogical writers who blazed the trail before me, not least Sir Anthony Wagner, Mark Herber, Terrick FitzHugh, George Pelling, Don Steel, John Titford and Susan Lumas. In other respects, and within the parameters set by what is expected of genealogical reference books, I have tried to add to this my personal perspective, not least by drawing on my experiences in translating genealogy into radio and television.
A NEW BOOK FOR A CHANGING WORLD
In this book, I have tried to reflect the extraordinary changes that have recently injected new life into this most ancient of subjects.
DNA technology
DNA technology has escaped the confines of the laboratory and become readily available to anyone with even a modest research budget. Do not be deceived by the relative brevity of my chapter on the subject; its implications for genealogy are vast.
Multi-cultural roots
Although Britain has always been a multi-cultural nation, a barrage of prejudices and phobias meant that we have only recently started to uncover the full extent of our global roots. Only in the last two decades have the many white families with black or Asian ancestors been able to start investigating such connections. Only recently have they been permitted by society and, in some cases, their own attitudes, to look on their connections with other continents with fascination rather than shame. Equally, thanks to the post-war mass immigration of black and Asian families, there are now a very great number of British families with roots exclusively from overseas. But by far the greatest trend, resulting from relationships between the different ethnic communities in Britain, is the rise of generations with roots both in indigenous white Britain and in other continents.
Shilpa Mehta (on the right) with her father, Shailendra, and brother, Shayur, in Zambia before her family settled permanently in England (see here).
Other genealogical writers have not ignored this fact, but nor have they addressed the issue in any depth. I felt that, in writing a book for genealogists in modern Britain, it was appropriate to broaden its scope to acknowledge the vast number of readers whose ethnic English blood – if they have any at all – is only a small proportion of their total ancestral mix. I have not attempted to write a worldwide guide to tracing family trees but, while the focus of the book is on research in England, I have tried to show and remind readers how the same or similar sources can be located and used in the rest of the British Isles and in countries all around the world. Please note that, when I refer to records outside Britain, I do so by way of example: the absence of a reference to a type of record in a certain country does not mean that records are not there. The volume of material available for America requires a separate book and has therefore been omitted almost entirely.
The internet
The internet has changed genealogy by making different types of records more easily searchable and by creating new resources that never existed before, such as the GenesReunited website. If you are serious about tracing your family tree, I recommend you either acquire a computer, find a good library or café providing internet access, or are very, very nice to someone who is already connected to the web. While you should never trust anything on the internet without checking it in original sources, the amount of time you can save using the resources available online is enormous.
The Genes Reunited Website home page: www.genesreunited.co.uk
On a daily basis, new indexes and resources appear, change, grow or, in some cases, disappear from the great information super-highway that is the worldwide web. Website addresses are so helpful and important that I have provided the ones that are most useful at the time of writing, and made them an integral part of the text. However, the rate of change inevitably means that, by the time you read this book, some things will have changed and proposed new legislation even threatens to restrict access to some of the records described here. In most cases, though, change will only have been for the better in terms of more records becoming more easily accessible via index and databases.
PROFESSIONAL HELP
I became a professional genealogist in 1992 after several years studying at the Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies. During most of my career, first working for a well-known firm of genealogists and latterly with my own freelance business, I have spent more time establishing what sources are available to solve particular problems and commissioning record agents to search them, than actually being in archives myself.
Connections between the past and present. My great-great-aunt Louisa Havers (1832–1937) at Ingatestone Hall, Essex, in 1917, with her young cousin Philip Coverdale who, as an old man, took me under his wing and taught me how to trace family trees.
This is a course of action I wholeheartedly recommend to all readers of this book. Many people say, ‘But I want to do it all myself.’ Fair enough – and use this book to acquire a detailed knowledge of the sources and their whereabouts. But there are many cases where paying a record searcher in a different county (or on the other side of the world) for a couple of hours’ work can save a vast amount of time, travel and accommodation costs, especially if the source you identified turns out to have been the wrong one. Receiving positive results by post (or email) may not be quite as exciting as turning over a dusty page and finding an ancestor’s name but, frankly, most records are now searchable only by microfiche in record offices anyway. The time you will have saved having the search done can then be spent visiting the place where you have discovered your ancestor once lived. If you really want to do it yourself, though, don’t let me stop you. I merely offer a piece of personal advice.
GETTING TO KNOW YOUR ANCESTORS
Throughout this introduction, I have referred to genealogy. There’s also a subject called family history. Essentially, genealogy is tracing who was who – the nuts and bolts of the family tree – while family history is more about finding out about the ancestors themselves, exploring their lives and working out how they came to do what they did and be who they were. That in itself then merges into the subject of biography. Once you have researched your family history in depth you will, in effect, have researched mini (or not so mini) biographies of your ancestors. Most, if not actually all, of the sources used by biographers are described in this book. Getting to know your ancestors can be a fascinating experience even if you do not (as people who have seen me in Antiques Ghostshow will know) want to roam into the world of psychics.
Filming the story of EastEnders’ convulted family tree on location at Elstree, 2000.
The author filming ITV’s Lost Royals at the College of Arms with former BBC Royal Correspondent Jenny Bond and Norrow and Ulster King of Arms.
But, in investigating your family tree, please bear in mind there is a real distinction between your ancestors and the records in which they appear. I have known people to cherish birth certificates as if they were the spiritual embodiments of their forbears. They are not. Think of when you last looked at yours and what a nuisance it is when you generate records similar to those you use for tracing ancestry. Obtaining passports and driving licences is a chore: dealing with banks, lawyers, the Inland Revenue and social services is tiring and invariably annoying. Often, when you encounter an ancestor in a record, they, too, were probably vexed and annoyed through the making of it. Equally, useful though they are, many modern genealogy programs and charts require you to focus so much on dates of birth, marriage and death that you can easily forget that the people concerned actually had lives in the intervening years. The real ancestors stand back behind the dates and records they generated: bear that in mind and you won’t go far wrong in learning to understand them.
PART ONE GETTING STARTED
Tracing family trees is mainly about seeking records, but before you do that, there’s a great deal you may be able to learn from your own family – close as well as distant relatives. And whatever you find out, don’t forget to write it down. Start properly and avoid tears later!
CHAPTER ONE ASK THE FAMILY
With very few exceptions, nobody knows more about your immediate family than your immediate family. Yet the first steps in tracing a family tree are often ignored or skipped over in the headlong dash for illustrious roots and unclaimed fortunes.
Most people reading this will probably have made at least some sort of start at researching their family tree. This chapter gives structure to your first steps and, I hope, to all your research over years to come.
Family papers: a letter to my great-great-grandmother from her husband’s cousin, Mrs Dorthea Boulger (1908), concerning their family history.
STARTING OFF
However old you are, the very best way to start research is by writing down your own essential details, which are:
Date and place of birth
Your education, occupations and where you have lived
Religious denomination
Anything interesting about yourself, which future generations may be glad you took the trouble to record
Date and place of marriage, and to whom (if applicable)
Date and place of children’s births and marriages (if applicable)
Then repeat the same process for your siblings, parents, their siblings, your grandparents and so on, adding details of when and where people died, if applicable.
One of the key elements here is write it all down because all this work will be to little avail if you do not record your findings.
Besides information on the living, you will soon start to record information on the deceased, as recalled by their children, grandchildren and so on. This is oral history – things known from memory rather than written records.
THE ORAL TRADITION
Originally, all family trees were known orally. In Britain, there are a handful of pedigrees of the ancient rulers of the Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Britons, Gaels and Picts, which stretch far back into the past, and which are known now because they were later written down. They contain some palpable mistakes and grey areas, but they are greatly valued because they are pretty much all we have left. Sadly, cultures such as Britain that adopted widespread use of written records tend very quickly to lose the oral history that has been accumulated over the centuries. For much of the Third World, and the native cultures of the Americas and Australasia, this invasion of literacy has happened much more recently, and oral traditions are still strong. With the spread of literacy, though, oral history is under threat and will probably disappear altogether very soon; hence the need to write it down and make it available on websites such as Genes Reunited.
LIFETIMES: A RICH ORAL TRADITION
JUST BECAUSE very few written records were made in pre-colonial Africa does not mean that family trees cannot be traced. Benhilda Chisveto of Edinburgh knew her father was Thomas Majuru, born in 1953, and that his mother was Edith, but that was all. She then made enquiries about her family from older relatives still living in her native Zimbabwe, and was told the following family tree, dictated orally and perhaps never recorded on paper before.
Thomas Majuru was son of Mubaiwa, son of Majuru (hence the modern surname), who lived near Harare, and who was apparently the only survivor of his area when British forces invaded in 1897. He buried the dead and then sought refuge in Murehwa, where the family now live. He was son of Mukombingo. Before Mukombingo, the line runs back, son to father, thus: Kakonzo; Mudavanhu; Mbari; Taizivei; Barahanga; Jengera; Zimunwe; Katowa; Mhangare; Maneru; Dambaneshure; Chihoka; Chiumbe; Musiwaro; Mukwashahuue; Makutiodora; Diriro; Gweru; Makaya; Chamutso; Guru; Waziva; Misi; Chitedza otherwise called Chibwe Chitedza; Nyavira also called Nyabira; Mukunti-Muora.
A FEW FACTS
The only dates in the oral history were for Mbari, who was chief of his tribe from 1795 to 1797, and Katowa, who was chief 1450-97. The earliest ancestor, Mukunti-Muora, supposedly lived 4000 years ago. One thousand would be more realistic, and to get back from 1795 to 1450 in five generations is stretching it. There may, then, be some omissions of generations, or misremembered facts, but that makes this no different to the earliest oral pedigrees of the British Isles, which stretch back to Arthur, Brutus of Troy and the god Woden. This does not detract from their immense value because they undoubtedly do record the names of ancestors who really lived, and who are not recorded in any other fashion. Lose the oral history and these ancient memories will vanish irrevocably.
Such traditions should be treated with the greatest respect, but it is unrealistic to imagine that they can be strictly accurate. When using oral history as the basis for original, record-based research, you mustn’t be surprised if you find names, dates or places are given slightly (or sometimes wildly) inaccurately. I sometimes get my own age wrong by a year (I certainly can’t remember my telephone number all the time), so you should be prepared for this and, if you do not find what you are looking for under Thompson in 1897, see if what you want isn’t listed under Thomson in 1898 instead.
Family papers: lists of children’s dates of birth and baptism were often kept by families, especially before the start of General Registration in 1837.
In fact, you can’t trace a record-based family tree properly without developing a healthy scepticism for anything you are told, or indeed anything you read. There are deceptions and lies, of course. One family I helped, who were called Newman, discovered their ancestor had faked his own suicide and started a new life – as a ‘new man’, his original name having been something completely different. More often, though, discrepancies and inaccuracies arise through simple mistakes or lapses of memory. ‘Granny would never lie,’ said one client of mine, ‘so that birth certificate must be wrong.’ No, Granny didn’t lie, she just got her age slightly wrong. There’s a real difference.
Indeed, recording oral history often relies on interviewing the elderly. Sometimes, it’s the only time very old people have any proper attention paid to them, so be indulgent if they don’t reel out exactly what you want in ten minutes flat. Letter, telephone and email can all help you gain valuable information from your relatives, but if you can visit them, so much the better. It may seem a bind, but it’s often worth it and will become part of your store of memories to pass on to later generations. I once went all the way to Tours in France to visit Lydia Renault, a cousin of my mother’s. I arrived at 11am and, whereas her English relations would have offered me tea and some ghastly old biscuits, Lydia suggested whisky and Coca-Cola, which we drank on her balcony, overlooking the Loire, while she regaled me with tales of her family at the start of the 20th century.
ELICITING THE PAST
That was an exception. If you get tea and stale biscuits, receive them with as great a semblance of delight as you can muster. If you are approaching someone you haven’t met before, make every effort to write and telephone in advance and make it absolutely clear you are after their invaluable knowledge, rather than their (usually less valuable) purse. Write down (or tape record) everything they say, as the seemingly irrelevant may later turn out to be the main clue that cracks the case. If they have difficulty remembering facts, ask them to talk you through any old photographs they may have – that often stimulates the synapses – and sometimes you may get more from them if you allow them to contradict you.
FOR EXAMPLE:
‘What was your grandfather’s mother called?’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’
‘I think it was Doris.’
‘No, no, Doris was his sister. His mother was Milly!’
Another tip: if they can’t remember a date of, say, when someone died, try to get them to narrow down the period in which it could have happened.
‘When did your great-grandmother die?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, do you remember her?’
‘Oh yes, she was at my wedding.’
‘So she was alive in 1935. And was she at your first child’s christening in 1937?’
‘Oh no, she died before then.’
Be sensitive, too, to changing social attitudes. Fascinating though it may be to you, the very elderly may not want to talk about their parents’ bigamous marriage, so if you want any information from them you must tread very carefully. One man’s black sheep, after all, is another’s hero.
THE POWER OF PAPER
Don’t forget, though, that younger relations of yours may have been told things by much older relations who are now dead. Equally – and here we leave the realms of oral history and move on a step – they, like the elderly, may have family papers and heirlooms. These come in so many forms: letters, school reports, memorial cards, passports, vaccination and ration cards, and so on, all crowned by the queen of all family papers, the family bible.
My grandfather’s air raid warden card. Note that he had been appointed before the war, in 1938.
Some bibles can be centuries old, faithfully recording the births, marriages and deaths of each member of the family. The tip to finding family bibles is to trace down the female-to-female line of the family, as they are often passed from mother to daughter. Lost or unwanted ones (how can anybody not want a family bible?) often end up at car boot sales and genealogical magazines have been known to publish letters from well wishers who have found such a bible, describing its contents and volunteering to return it to the right family.
Whether it’s a family bible or a 70-year-old funeral bill, write down all the salient details (or, better still, photocopy everything) because such papers may contain clues that will only become useful to you long afterwards. Ignore such advice at your peril and, if you have to go back all the way to Wigan to have another look at your cousin’s grandmother’s address book you didn’t bother with ten years ago, don’t blame me.
Pages from the Fairfax family bible, which even includes an extra newspaper cutting.
Actually, the real prize transcends even that, because sometimes you will find that an ancestor will already have tried to trace the family tree. One of the things that really encouraged me to pursue my own was being given a Harrods’ carrier bag full of ‘the family papers’, which turned out to be my great-great grandmother’s notes, showing her attempts to trace her family tree between 1880 and 1920. Sadly there was no sign of her finished family trees – if there ever were any – and nor have they ever turned up. However, the bag did include replies to letters she had written to her second and third cousins, thus filling out my own family tree before I had ever set foot outside my front door.
Family reunions: a family photograph showing the Adolph, Mitchiner and Gale families celebrating the 80th birthday of my grandfather Joseph Adolph in 1990.
AN OUTLINE OF THE MAIN SOURCES
PRELIMINARY RESEARCH
Make notes on what you know
Constantly update your notes
Ask immediate family
Network with remoter family
Register with www.genesreunited.co.uk (see here) and other ‘contact’ websites
Update your entries as you learn more
BASIC RESEARCH
General Registration (from 1837) (see Chapter Five)
Censuses (1841-1901) (see Chapter Six)
Wills and administrations from 1858 (see Chapter Twelve)
MORE IN-DEPTH RESEARCH
Unindexed censuses, using directories (see Chapter Eight)
Parish registers (from 1538) (see Chapter Ten)
Bishops’ transcripts (from 1598) (see here)
Manorial records (see Chapter Eleven)
Wills and letters of administration (before 1858) (see Chapter Twelve)
Gravestones (mainly from 17th century) (see Chapter Thirteen)
Newpapers for obituaries, etc. (Mainly from 18th century) (see Chapter Fourteen)
Electoral registers (see Chapter Eighteen), etc. to find addresses
Parish chest and poor law material (mainly from 17th century) (see Chapter Nineteen)
Occupation records (especially army and navy, mainly from 18th century) (see Chapter Twenty-One and Chapter Twenty-Two)
Legal records (see Chapter Twenty-Five)
Education records (see Chapter Twenty-Six)
Printed pedigrees, heraldic records, etc. (see Chapter Thirty-One and Chapter Thirty-Two)
AND, IF ALL GOES EXCEPTIONALLY WELL …
Medieval tax lists and land records (from 1086) (see Chapter Twenty-Three)
Early university and school records from Middle Ages (see Chapter Twenty-Six)
Ancient oral pedigrees now in print
CHAPTER TWO WRITING IT ALL DOWN
The rest of this book is about how to trace your ancestry, but this chapter focuses on how to record your findings, from getting all your notes written down on computer or paper and moving onto understanding the family tree conventions.
Your Family Tree and Family History Monthly genealogical magazines.
Some people can get bogged down in choosing computer packages, filing systems and so on. Frankly, if you enjoy computer programs, then you’ll love family history, as there is a vast array to chose from, reviewed and advertised in the genealogical magazines like Your Family Tree and Family History Monthly, with an excellent comparative chart at www.Myhistory.co.uk. Everyone has a preference. Personally, I don’t rate very highly the packages that invite you to fill in forms about all your ancestors. I feel it de-humanises them and encourages some people to become obsessed simply with the act of form filling with completing forms that can’t be. Me? I keep a cardboard file for each family I am tracing, containing photographs, documents, notes and so on, and a rough family tree on paper, and then maintain a narrative pedigree on my word processor. Once I feel satisfied with what I have done, I may also write up a summarised version of the family story, including the best pictures and documents, either to circulate among the family or to submit to a relevant family history journal (see here).
GETTING IT ON PAPER
The main point at this stage is to write everything down. Be they oral or written, quote your sources precisly. Later, you can interpret the sources, but if you do this initially and discard the original information, and then find that your interpretation of the sources had been wrong, you (or someone else trying to help you – and, believe me, I’ve been there!) may have a terrible time disentangling what is correct from what is not. This applies just as much to interviewing people as to record-based research. In addition, always write down exactly what records you were searching, for what periods and for what you searched. If you do, and later you find that you are stuck, you may rely on your notes to tell you, say, that you looked under Thompson and also Thomson, thus potentially saving yourself a repeat journey to a record office to perform a search you had, in fact, already carried out but forgotten about.
THE BASIC FAMILY TREE
CRANE PRINTS
OLD FAMILY TREES were drawn with the names of parents in circles and their children radiating out below them. This arrangement was thought to resemble the footprints of Cranes in the soft mud of river banks, hence their name ‘Crane’s foot’ – ‘pied de Cru’ – pedigree!
There are several different types of family tree. These are:
‘Family trees’ and ‘pedigrees’, sometimes prefixed with the term ‘dropline’ (a chart with the earliest ancestor at the top and each subsequent generation connected by dropping lines), are one and the same – charts depicting a line or lines of ancestry.
‘Narrative pedigrees’, which are family trees written down in paragraphs, a style that is used by Burke’s Peerage and which is a highly effective way of recording a lot of information in a small space, but which isn’t so good for easily seeing who’s related to who. It is not much use for conducting original research, when only a family tree will make everything clear.
Seize quartiers, which spread out either like trees or in concentric circles, to show both parents, all four grandparents, the eight great-grandparents and – if you can manage it – all 16 great-greats. The original purpose of seize quartiers was snobbish, as you had to prove that all 16 were noble if you wanted to join foreign orders of knighthood like the Golden Fleece. Now, however, they are a good way of showing you have traced your family exhaustively. But don’t feel obliged and become exhausted, this is supposed to be fun and you can aim to trace as much or as little as you want.
Part of my mother’s family tree, showing how Germans Printed pedigrees in the 1930s.
CHARTING CONVENTIONS
= Indicates a marriage, accompanied by ‘m.’ and the date and place
— Solid lines indicate definite connections
… Dotted lines indicate probable but unproven ones
Wiggly lines are for illegitimacy and ‘x’ for a union out of wedlock important on old pedigrees but less relevant today
– – Loops are used if two unconnected lines need to cross over
Wives usually go on the right of husbands, though only if that doesn’t interfere with the overall layout of the chart
Conventionally, surnames are put after men’s but not women’s names, but again this is becoming a bit old fashioned
Equally, there are no rules about what you can or can’t include on a family tree. Put in as much or as little as you want and include as many families as you want, though beware of cluttering. I would recommend a minimum of full names, dates of birth or baptism, marriage and death or burial, where those events took place, and occupations. If your chart lacks any of these, it will be of little use to other researchers and, more importantly, it will be boring. If you know someone was crushed to death by a bear or invented the casserole dish, for goodness sake put it on the chart!
There are some sensible conventions and abbreviations, which you’ll need to know both for compiling your own charts and understanding other peoples’. These have been outlined above.
Marriage bond for John Nursey, surgeon of Coddenham, Suffolk.
EXPANDING ON THE BASICS
When it comes to writing up the family history, you can, again, decide what to say and how to say it, and you can get ideas from the examples in this book and the many published family histories and articles in family history journals and magazines.
It’s a good idea to try to relate the events in the family to the world around them:
Who was on the throne
What wars and plagues would have concerned or affected them
What the places where they lived were like at the time
What their occupations entailed.
This is a valuable exercise, which might actually help you find out more about them, or highlight inaccuracies or even mistakes in the family tree. It is also a good reminder that these were real, breathing people who existed in the world, not as pale shadows on old, dusty records. Indeed, if you think your ancestors only existed within the confines of parish register entries and, now, the forms generated by genealogical computer programs, it’s unlikely you will gain very much from family history, or that other people will enjoy and benefit from your hard work. The more you can think of and convey the idea of your ancestors as real human beings, the more fun – and success – you’re likely to have.
PRESENTING YOUR RESULTS
HERE IS THE SAME information about the Fairfax family, presented as a narrative pedigree, a prose account and a traditional family tree.
NARRATIVE PEDIGREE
John Fairfax, born about 1710, married Mary Hayward on 16 September 1735 at Framlingham, Suffolk. He was a draper and grocer of Coddenham and wrote his will in 1751, naming his executors as his wife Mary and brother-in-law John Hayward. It was proved 2 June 1758 (Suffolk Record Office IC/AA1/184/49). His children (details of which are recorded in the family bible) included:
1. Frances, born 24 May 1736, baptised 25 May and died 31 May, Stowmarket.
2. Mary, born 9 June 1738, baptised 26 June at Stowmarket.
3. John Fairfax, born 30 June 1739, died 15 weeks old, buried at Stowmarket.
4. John Fairfax, born 30 August 1741. Left a watch by his father. Married Penelope Wright at St James’s, Bury St Edmund’s, on 5 May 1770. Elected freeman of Bury St Edmunds, 1802. Death recorded in Gentleman’s Magazine as being in a fit on 12 February 1805 while visiting ‘a friend [sic], Mr P. Nursey, at Little Bealings’. He had two children:
1. Penelope, born on 17 April and baptised on 31 May 1771 at St James’s, buried on 30 June 1787 at Bury St Edmunds.
2. Catherine, born on 6 November 1772 and baptised on 3 December 1790 at Bury St Edmunds by Rev. Mr Sharp, as is recorded in the family bible.
5. Catherine Fairfax, born 7 September 1742 and baptised by Mr Meadows. Inherited share of a messuage in Kettleburgh from cousin Katherine Fairfax in 1747/50. Married John Nursey by licence on 4 April 1764 at Coddenham, before witnesses John and Mary Fairfax; he was described as a surgeon of Coddenham and she as daughter of John Fairfax of Coddenham, a draper. Died at Wickham Market on 13 April 1827, aged 85. No will has been found in Suffolk. They had children, including the landscape artist Perry Nursey (baptised on 25 June 1771 at Stonham Aspall).
Catherine Nursey, née Fairfax, mother of the Suffolk landscape painter Perry Nursey. Picture owned by her descendant Mrs Nancy Bedwell.
PROSE ACCOUNT
THE LIFE OF JOHN FAIRFAX
JOHN FAIRFAX was born in 1710, four years before the death of Queen Anne ushered in the reign of George I and the start of the Hanoverian period. Growing up in rural Suffolk, he was variously described as a grocer and draper in the village of Coddenham, indicating either an enterprising mind or (less likely in view of the relative prosperity of his children) an inability to find the right niche in life. He married Mary Hayward on 16 September 1735 at Framlingham, a market town some ten miles from Coddenham, and, indeed, going to market there may have been how he met her. He wrote his will in 1751, making her and her brother John his executors, and it was proved, indicating he had died by then, in 1758, two years before the death of King George II.
John’s children included Frances, Mary, two Johns and Catherine, of whom Frances and the first John died young. To his surviving son JOHN FAIRFAX he left his watch ‘that was my cousin Smith’s’ and £63 to apprentice him ‘to some proper business at a fit age’. This younger John married Penelope Wright at St James’s, Bury St Edmund’s, on 5 May 1770 and obviously benefited from his apprenticeship, as he became a freeman of Bury St Edmunds in 1802. He died in a fit on 12 February 1805 while visiting his nephew, the artist Perry Nursey, at Little Bealings. He had two children, Penelope and Catherine.
John senior’s daughter Catherine, born 7 September 1742, received a bequest of land from her father’s cousin Catherine Fairfax in 1750 and, perhaps as a result of this, made a good marriage to the local surgeon, John Nursey of Coddenham. They married there by licence on 4 April 1764. She was mother of the artist Perry Nursey (baptised on 25 June 1771 at Stonham Aspall), at whose house her brother died in 1805.
FAMILY TREE
CHAPTER THREE ANCESTRAL PICTURES
Most of this book is about finding records of ancestors. Pictures can be records, too; even a photographer’s address on the back of an old snap could provide a clue as to where the depicted ancestor came from. But they are also valuable in their own right as a fantastic way of bringing your family history to life.
My cousin Ernest Rietschel of Dresden, a renowned German Sculptor, who was born in Pulsnitz in 1804 and died in Dresden in 1861.
Before the invention of photography in the 19th century, some of our ancestors were depicted in paintings, sketches, silhouettes and even busts and sculptures. From grand Van Dycks to amateur scribbles, such pictures are always worth seeking out, for, especially in family history, a picture really can be worth a thousand words.
WHERE TO SEARCH
PAINTERS AND PAINTINGS
For painters and paintings, look to M. Bryan’s Dictionary of Painters and Engravers (London, 1903–4) and F. Spalding’s 20th-century Painters and Sculptors (Antique Collectors Club, 1991).
The best places to make searches are in London at Westminster Central Reference Library, the National Portrait Gallery (which has a database of over 500,000 portraits and engravings), and the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Of course, many ‘painters’ in the past were no more than jobbing artisans and many, such as engravers, herald painters and so on, appear in routine apprenticeship records. A detailed article on sources for artists and their subjects is in Family History Monthly, March 2003.
QUICK REFERENCE
WESTMINSTER CENTRAL REFERENCE LIBRARY
www.westminster.gov.uk/services/libraries/findalibrary/westref/
NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY
www.npg.org.uk/search
NATIONAL ART LIBRARY
www.vam.ac.uk/page/n/national-art-library
Gainsborough’s famous family portrait of Mr and Mrs Andrews, c.1748–9.
PHOTOGRAPHERS AND PHOTOGRAPHS
Photography began in earnest in the 1850s and portrait photographs of people who became our ancestors took off in the 1870s. Collections of photographs are at county record offices, libraries and elsewhere, often enabling you to see what places where your ancestors lived looked like and, if you are very lucky, you might even find a picture of your ancestor.
WHERE TO SEARCH
PHOTOGRAPHERS AND PHOTOGRAPHS
The largest collection in Europe is the Hulton Getty Collection with a staggering 12 million pictures. The National Monuments Record Centre has 6.5 million pictures, mostly of buildings around the time of the Second World War, indexed by parish.
There are many commercial outlets for old photographs and reprints from old negatives, such as the Francis Frith Collection. There will often be a book of old photographs of the places where your ancestors lived.
There are also several excellent guides to dating old pictures, including R. Pol’s Dating Old Photographs (FFHS, 1998). Many other sources for pictures are listed in J. Foster and J. Sheppard’s British Archives: A Guide to Archive Resources in the United Kingdom (Palgrave, 2002). Another guide to collections is R. Eakins’ Picture Sources UK (Macdonald, 1985).
QUICK REFERENCE
HULTON GETTY COLLECTION
www.hultongetty.com
NATIONAL MONUMENTS RECORD CENTRE
www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/national-monuments-record-centre
FRANCIS FRITH COLLECTION
www.francisfrith.co.uk
CHAPTER FOUR BEFORE YOU BEGIN
Before starting with the main sources for tracing ancestry it is important to understand a little about how and where records are kept, starting with the main archives, and the different ways of gaining access to them. Reading this chapter now may save you a great deal of head-scratching and wasted time later on.
ARCHIVES
There are many organisations that hold archives of records. Be aware that most exist to preserve records, and not primarily to let you finger them. Most of the help you will receive from such organisations will be provided out of kindness, not obligation. Courtesy and thanks never go amiss, whoever you are dealing with.
If you are thinking of visiting an archive to undertake some research, always make sure it will be open, find out if you need to book and also do your best to establish that the records you want to see are actually there. Remember that sometimes records are temporarily removed from their permanent homes for restoration, rebinding and other reasons. Most are free but require a reader’s ticket, so if you do not have one, take some identification, preferably a passport.
USING THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES
GETTING HOLD of material from TNA couldn’t be easier:
You can establish what documents you want to see on www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/catalogue and pre-order them so they will be ready when you arrive.
You can also have photocopies made on the spot or take a digital camera with you and photograph the records you want while you are there.
Finally, you can also order documents once you are there for delivery to your home address.
THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES (TNA)
This was formed in 2003 through a merger of the Public Record Office and the Historic Manuscripts Commission (HMC). TNA is the principal repository for British national records, which are referred to constantly in this book. Among those records that are used the most by family historians are censuses and Prerogative Court of Canterbury wills and records relating to soldiers and sailors.
The main task of the HMC, also called the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, is to catalogue collections of records outside TNA. Its published reports cover a vast array of manuscripts in public and private hands, from the House of Lords to Longleat, and including businesses, solicitors’ papers, county record offices and so on.
The indexes to the printed reports can make surprising and rewarding ‘lucky dip’ searches, and the HMC’s on-going work is indexed centrally in the National Register of Archives, accessible via TNA’s website. This includes a search facility for those personal names and topics that have been indexed within the records and leads direct to contact details for the relevant archive.
TNA’s website provides a great deal of information about how to get to and use the archives and its records, and also enables you to download any of its many very informative information leaflets which will tell you more about many of the most commonly used records. Look at the website before you go to TNA, not least because you can pre-order the documents and have them ready and waiting for you when you walk in. The website also contains some very useful databases, particularly the main catalogue, www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/catalogue, which you can use as a short cut for specific searches or as a general trawl for references to the names that interest you. You are highly likely to find them cropping up in categories of documents you never expected, or even categories of documents you had never heard of before. Stella Colwell’s The National Archives, (TNA, 2006) is geared specifically to genealogists.
TNA also maintains Access to Archives, an online catalogue to material held in many British archives, including the county record offices. Once you have found material that interests you it also provides links to the Archon Directory www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/archon, to give you full contact details for the archive concerned.
In the old days censuses were kept at Portugal Street, and General Registration records of birth, marriage and death were kept at Somerset House, then St Catherine’s House, and then the Family Records Centre. Now all are on file/fiche at TNA, and are increasingly available online.
OTHER ARCHIVES
Wales: Wales was officially subsumed by England in 1536, but it has its own archives in the National Library of Wales.
Scotland: Scotland’s National Archives of Scotland (NAS), are now part of the new ScotlandsPeople Centre. The catalogues of this and most other Scottish archives are available at www.scan.org.uk.
Ireland: Both Eire and Northern Ireland have central archives, the National Archives of Ireland and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI). (Contact details for these addresses in Ireland are given in the Quick Reference panel below.)
COUNTY RECORD OFFICES
Unlike TNA, county record offices are a relatively new innovation, starting from the archiving work of George Herbert Fowler in 1913.
The county record offices grew out of the old diocesan record offices and their main achievement was bringing together many of each county’s public records under one roof, and it was this that helped fuel the first boom in family history research in the 1970s. Most county record office catalogues are now accessible through Access to Archives. Offline, an excellent guide to the county record offices is J. Gibson and P. Peskett’s Record Offices: How to find them (FFHS, 1996).
OTHER ARCHIVES
The best guide to specialist archives is J. Foster and J. Sheppard’s British Archives: A Guide to Archive Resources in the United Kingdom (Palgrave, 2002). One page alone gives details of the Carpenters’ Company archives in the City of London, which date from the Middle Ages; the Carlton Club, with registers of members from 1832; and Camden Local Studies Centre, whose holdings include records of the Manor of Hampstead 1742–1843 and the papers of George Bernard Shaw.
MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES
Both are excellent for background information on what places were like when your ancestors lived there, but they can also hold extraordinary collections that may include information on your families. Foremost is the British Library, whose website includes its catalogue to manuscripts and printed books, enabling you to search for what you want and order it before you go.
Local museums and libraries, especially local studies libraries, hold photographic collections for the locality, and the librarians themselves are often very knowledgeable about the area, electoral registers, local maps, and so on.
MORMON WEBSITE AND FAMILY HISTORY CENTRES
With its world HQ at the Family History Library, the Mormon church, officially the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, maintains about 100 Mormon Family History Centres around the UK, freely open to the public and containing many useful genealogical resources. The church’s interest in family history is religious – its aim ultimately is to identify as many people as possible, living and dead, in the context of their family relationships. To this end, they have amassed a vast collection of microfilms of original records from all over the world, including many British archives and many records described in this book. Any of these can be ordered to your local centre. The timorous should be reassured that visitors are entirely safe from any attempt to convert them – far from it: Mormons have made an immense contribution to this field, accessed for free. The Mormons’ free website, www.familysearch.org, is described in detail here. Another Salt Lake-based organisation, MyFamily.Com, which owns Ancestry.Com, has a pay-to-view website (www.ancestry.com), which contains a great and growing number of records, especially drawn from censuses.
QUICK REFERENCE
HISTORIC MANUSCRIPTS COMMISSION (HMC)
www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/archives-sector/hmc.htm
NATIONAL ARCHIVES (TNA)
www.nationalarchives.gov.uk
NATIONAL REGISTER OF ARCHIVES
www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/nra
ACCESS TO ARCHIVES
www.A2A.org.uk
ARCHON DIRECTORY
www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/archon
GENERAL REGISTER OFFICE (GRO)
www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/
NATIONAL LIBRARY OF WALES
(LLYFRGELL GENEDLAETHOL CYMRU)
www.llgc.org.uk
NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF SCOTLAND (NAS)
www.nas.gov.uk/
NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF IRELAND
www.nationalarchives.ie
PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE OF NORTHERN IRELAND (PRONI)
http://www.proni.gov.uk/
BRITISH LIBRARY
http://blpc.bl.uk
MORMON FAMILY HISTORY CENTRES
www.familysearch.org
OTHER WEBSITES
SCOTLANDSPEOPLE
Scotland’s Old Parochial Registers, censuses, testaments (wills) and much of its General Registration is online at a pay-to-view site.
Scotland’s very own research website home page.
GENES REUNITED
There are a number of websites that aim to link up family trees, but the most exciting is www.genesreunited.co.uk. The site allows you to enter details of your family (or upload a family tree already typed in ‘Gedcom’ format), building an online family tree, which is easily altered and amended.
A number of search tools then enable you to find out if surnames on your tree appear on other trees on the site. In return for a £9.50 a year membership fee, you can email the contributors of other possibly relevant names and work out if you do indeed have ancestors in common, and if so create a link between the two trees. Those with common surnames will be relieved to know that the searches can be honed, by personal name, year of birth and by place of birth.
The site was launched in November 2002 and at the time of writing has 8 million members worldwide and over 111 million names. It is therefore becoming a formidable research tool, which can already be used to localise where people with particular surnames were born and communicate with people actively researching them. The site is one of several that provides access to many important sets of data, particularly the quarterly indexes to General Registration indexes and 1841–1901 census returns.
OTHER GENERAL WEBSITES
The internet, as everyone knows, contains a great many websites of use to genealogists. There is no official central portal for these, but there is an unofficial one, www.cyndislist.com, which has assumed this role and contains categorised links to pretty much everything that’s out there.
A British version of this is www.genuki.org.uk, containing links to many useful websites for the whole British Isles. Genuki also hosts a plethora of newsgroups and mailing lists, searchable under areas and topics, that you can join. An overview of other important websites is given here.
SOCIETIES
Many countries have societies formed by genealogists to help each other. The main one in Britain is the Society of Genealogists (SoG). Its library is the finest of its kind, including the Great Card Index (3.5 million slips from a vast array of sources) and a huge collection of pedigrees submitted by members, varying enormously in quality but including many of very high standard. The contents of its library together with many searchable databases are on its website. It publishes the Genealogists’ Magazine.
A curiosity in English genealogy is the Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies (IHGS). It organises a graded series of courses and qualifications in genealogy. It also has a library that is open to the public for a fee and produces a journal, Family History.
Most counties (sometimes even parts of counties) and some specialist areas such as Catholic and Anglo-German have family history societies. They come under the umbrella of the Federation of Family History Societies (FFHS). Membership includes many Commonwealth and United States societies too, and it publishes Family History News and Digest biannually, summarising the contents of the different journals. Family History Societies have membership worldwide and their journals include articles on relevant sources and case studies, lists of members’ interests and ancestral names. Many also have their own libraries and organise projects to index records such as gravestones and censuses. It is often a good idea to join your nearest Family History Society even if you do not have any local ancestors, because many of the talks will be of more general application, and many organise reciprocal research via other societies.
ONE-NAME SOCIETIES
THESE SOCIETIES concern those interested in specific names, such as the Fairfax Society. Many are members of the FFHS and Guild of One-Name Studies (‘GOONS’!). Many produce journals or newsletters, and besides collecting and tracing individual family trees for a name, many systematically extract all references to the name from categories of records such as General Registration indexes, so are well worth consulting.
Large libraries, such as the SoG, have collections of journals from societies outside Britain. The FFHS and www.cyndislist.com can put you in touch with relevant societies abroad.
QUICK REFERENCE
SOCIETY OF GENEALOGISTS (SoG)
www.sog.org.uk
INSTITUTE OF HERALDIC AND GENEALOGICAL STUDIES (IHGS)
www.ihgs.ac.uk
FEDERATION OF FAMILY HISTORY SOCIETIES (FFHS)
www.ffhs.org.uk
GUILD OF ONE-NAME STUDIES (GOONS)
www.one-name.org
MAGAZINES
There are a number of family history magazines on the market, publishing ‘how to’ articles, items on general and specialist sources and specific family stories, and usually including book, software and website reviews, question-and-answer pages, letters, news and contact details for both professional and private researchers. The main ones in Britain are Family History Monthly, Family Tree Magazine, Practical Family History, Who Do You Think You Are?, Your Family Tree and Ancestors, the latter produced by TNA. In a similar category is the Genealogical Services Directory, which provides up-to-date contact details for all British Isles record offices, family history societies, organisations and professional record searchers and genealogists.
BIBLIOGRAPHIES
Much research has already been published and it is always worth checking to see if your family tree is included. The main British genealogical bibliography is G. W. Marshall’s The Genealogist’s Guide (GPC, reprinted 1973); supplemented by J. B. Whitmore’s A Genealogical Guide: An Index to British Pedigrees in Continuation of Marshall’s Genealogist’s Guide (J. B. Whitmore, 1953). Besides the well-known Burke’s publications, heralds’ visitations (see here) and much else, these books encompass the rich veins of material ranging from transcripts of pedigrees in Close Rolls to copies of memorial inscriptions in overseas cemeteries, published in Victorian and early 20th-century antiquarian journals.
Coming closer to the present, there is G. B. Barrow’s The Genealogists’ Guide: An Index to Printed British Pedigrees and Family Histories 1950–75 (Research Publishing Co., 1977), followed by T. R. Thompson’s A Catalogue of British Family Histories (Research Publishing Co and SoG, 1980). Incredibly useful too are Stuart Raymond’s County Bibliographies (S. A. and M. J. Raymond). These books reference published material (including family history journals) in terms of family histories and local histories, newspapers, county histories and published records of all sorts, particularly providing an overview of the publications of the county and national record societies and publications.
For Scotland there are M. Stuart’s Scottish Family History (GPC, 1978), supplemented by P. S. Ferguson’s Scottish Family Histories (National Library of Scotland, 1986), and for Ireland, the bibliographies compiled by B. de Breffny in 1964 and E. MacLysaght in 1982.
Many privately published and rare manuscript family histories are catalogued in the SoG’s online catalogue, SoGCAT, www.sog.org.uk/sogcat/sogcat. Many printed family histories are digitally available in the Family History Library catalogue section of www.familysearch.org.
BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARIES
Many countries have biographical dictionaries. Britain has led the way with L. Stephen and S. Lee’s Dictionary of National Biography (Smith, Elder&Co., 1885), which was kept up to date by a series of supplements and completely revised and re-edited to create the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (OUP, 2004). It is available in print and can be searched online on a subscription basis at www.oup.com/oxforddnb, though it should also be available at good libraries. You can search not just under the names of the subjects, but also under any other names (such as wives, sons-in-law, and so on) appearing in the articles and also by topic. So if you want to find any biographies mentioning something like ice cream, you can.
The DNB has been fully updated by a huge team of writers, including me, and the biographies include, where known, dates and places of birth, death, marriage and burial and any known details of parents, family origins, spouses, and offspring and is thus a formidable genealogical as well as biographical source.
Many people were important or well known in their time but are not considered so by posterity. There have been many biographical dictionaries past and present, not least Who’s Who (OUP), which has been published annually since 1897, and its accompanying Who Was Who (OUP), concerning the deceased, both of which are combined on a CD-Rom version. Here you will find the great and the good, from holders of public office to captains of industry, the top brass in the armed forces, the upper echelons of the clergy, and also writers, artists, editors and a host of others. Brief details are provided of dates of birth, marriage, death, parents and offspring. It is more useful for providing a date of birth so you can seek a birth certificate than in actually providing adequate genealogical details in its own right – but, of course, the biographical information it contains is marvellous.
From hip to history:Linda McCartney’s tragically early death means she has joined Princess Diana in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Besides these, there are many further biographical dictionaries relating to specific groups in society, like the armed forces or religious groups, which are discussed in the appropriate chapters.
RECORD SOCIETY PUBLICATIONS
Many county record offices and archives have published indexed volumes transcribing some of their original records. The Lancashire and Cheshire Record Society, for example, has published many of its counties’ wills, royalist composition papers, freemen records and much else. Trawling through these can throw up all sorts of treasures.
The easiest way of finding out what has been published is through E. L. C. Mullins’ Texts and Calendars: An Analytical Guide to Serial Publications, Vol. I (RHS, 1958) and Vol. II, 1957–1982 (RHS, 1983), D. and W. B. Stevenson’s Scottish Texts & Calendars: An Analytical Guide to Serial Publications (Royal Historical Society, London) and Scottish Royal Historical Society (Edinburgh, 1987). These may save you very lengthy searches through original records.
THE SOCIETY OF GENEALOGISTS
MANY PUBLISHED and even manuscript family histories have been deposited at the Society of Genealogists. Their catalogue is therefore a sort of superbibliography of work done previously. As of 2005, the catalogue can be searched online at www.sog.org.uk/sogcat/index.html. Many family histories can also be seen online at www.lib.byu.edu/fhc.
SPECIALIST INDEXES
A catch-all to the many weird and wonderful indexes out there is J. Gibson and E. Hampson’s Specialist Indexes for Family Historians (FFHS, 1998). This covers topics as diverse as Congregational and Baptist ministers at Dr William’s Library, London (see here); multiple births worldwide; memorial cards (1846–1980); criminal registers in TNA class HO 27 (1805–92); members of the Ancient Order of Foresters; and much else.
RESEARCH DIRECTORIES
Besides magazines, journals and an increasingly huge number of websites, many private researchers are also listed in special directories and for a small fee you can be listed too, with your name, address and the names you are interested in, with specific periods and countries, if applicable. The best known directories are the Genealogical Research Directory and the Federation of Family History Societies’ British Isles Genealogical Research Directory, commonly known as the ‘Big R’, which is now available on CD-Rom. If making contact by post, be aware of the widely practised code of conduct: always to enclose SAEs. Some people will not reply to correspondents who do not do so, even if they are offering valuable information or are long-lost cousins. Online equivalents to these directories are the many websites that put people in touch with those with similar interests, particularly www.genesreunited.co.uk (see here).
WHERE TO SEARCH
EXAMPLES OF ARCHIVES IN OTHER COUNTRIES
Many people living in Britain were born abroad and many more have ancestry from overseas. Most have national archives or equivalents. To find them, you can consult www.cyndislist.com or T. F. Beard with D. Demong’s How to Find your Family Roots (McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1977). Besides Europe, these are countries that will contribute most significantly to the ancestry of people living in Britain over the next few generations, and their archive details are given here.
INDIA
Much of India belonged to the Mogul Empire, which was founded in India in 1526. Various European states, starting with the Portuguese, established trading bases in India but the Honourable East India Company (HEIC) had become the dominant power by 1691. The British Empire in India was recognised by the Treaty of Paris in 1763.
In 1947, the records of the HEIC were transferred to the British Library’s Oriental and India Office Collections, known as the India Office Library, whose records are comprehensively described in M. Moir’s A General Guide to the India Office Library (British Library 1988). The library’s vast collections are very well indexed and has a biographical index, which brings together details on individuals from many of its sources, including records of birth, baptism and so on. These can be found at http://indiafamily.bl.uk/UI. Records include ships’ passenger lists for those coming and going – and a vast many did, either with the army or in some civil capacity
In addition to the wealth of material at the India Office, the SoG has a formidable collection relating to the British in India, not least the India index, containing much biographical data. The Indiaman, a magazine covering the British in India, has launched a wesbite www.indiaman.com. In India the main archives are the National Archives of India.
PAKISTAN AND BANGLADESH
Pakistan was created in 1947 out of two distinct parts of India as a separate state for Muslims. It was a British dominion and became a republic in 1956, and a federal Islamic republic in 1973. In 1971, the eastern part of Pakistan achieved its own independence, as the state of Bangladesh. The main archives are the Pakistan National Archives. Bangladesh’s main archive is the Directorate of Archives and Libraries.
KENYA
The British established a protectorate over the region in 1895 and white settlers arrived from South Africa and Britain, with many Indian immigrants arriving also. Many Kenyan Indians were subsequently forced to leave due to the ‘Kenyanisation’ of business and commerce in 1968 at which point they moved to Britain. The archives are at Kenya National Archives.
JAMAICA
The national archives for Jamaica are the Registrar General’s Department Island Record Office.
QUICK REFERENCE
INDIA OFFICE LIBRARY
NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF INDIA
nationalarchives.nic.in/
PAKISTAN NATIONAL ARCHIVES
DIRECTORATE OF ARCHIVES AND LIBRARIES
KENYA NATIONAL ARCHIVES
REGISTRAR GENERAL’S DEPARTMENT
PROFESSIONAL GENEALOGISTS AND RECORD AGENTS
An increasing number of people and small firms are advertising their services as researchers in genealogical magazines such as Family History Monthly, in the Genealogical Services Directory and similar publications, and in the lists of independent searchers maintained by many record offices. They come in two categories – professional genealogists like me who plan, implement, direct and report on projects investigating family trees; or record agents, who are hired to undertake very specific pieces of research at their client’s instructions. It is best to hire those who are qualified under educational systems such as the IHGS or who have a proven track record of experience and professionalism. Many belong to organisations such as the Association of Genealogists and Researchers in Archives (AGRA), but be aware that membership often means just that and does not imply very stringent tests of ability.
There are very few dishonest researchers in the field, but a great many incompetent ones. If someone’s initial response to your enquiry is in any manner unprofessional (badly typed or not typed at all), throw it away. Very few professionals worth their salt are without email. Whoever you hire, make sure that they understand exactly what you want to know before you part with your money.
Be equally understanding, though, that professionals must charge for their time and effort regardless of whether they find exactly what they and you were hoping for. Negative results must be paid for too and it is not always entirely negative to know where an ancestor was not.
QUICK REFERENCE
INSTITUTE OF HERALDIC AND GENEALOGICAL STUDIES (IHGS)
www.ihgs.ac.uk
ASSOCIATION OF GENEALOGISTS AND RESEARCHERS IN ARCHIVES (AGRA)
www.agra.org.uk
GENEALOGY SURVIVAL KIT/1
THESE PAGES contains various miscellaneous but also very useful facts to help you in your research.
ENGLISH WORDS
You will come across lots of old-fashioned expressions and phrases, which is half the fun of exploring the past. There are some specialist dictionaries like R. Milward’s A Glossary of Household, Farming and Trade Terms from Probate Inventories (Derbyshire Record Society, occasional paper 1). A stalwart source, however, remains the Oxford English Dictionary, the older the edition the better.
OLD HANDWRITING
Reading old handwriting is called palaeography. There are two sorts of problems:
1. In the past, some letters were written differently to the way they are now, so are extremely unfamiliar.
Examples of the different styles of letters are given to the below.
Be aware, too, that writers often abbreviated words using apostrophes, or sometimes apostrophes followed by the last letter or two – and sometimes the apostrophes were just missed out. ‘William’ was often written ‘Will’m’ or Wm, James as ‘Jas’, ‘Majesty’ as Maty’ and so on.
Two excellent guides to old scripts are H. E. P. Grieve’s Examples of English Handwriting 1150–1750 (Essex Record Office, 1949) and L. Mumby’s Reading Tudor and Stuart Handwriting (Phillimore for BALH, 1988).
2. Bad handwriting. However, like cracking codes, you can often work out what an incomprehensible letter is by studying its companions. For example, if you can read ‘Ed-ard’ then you can surmise the other letter is a ‘w’ – but look for the letter elsewhere to make sure you have it right: never go with an unsupported guess.
You can also see how letters are written in phrases or words where you know what the letters should be. Many wills, for example, start ‘In the name of God Amen’, so you can see how the scribe wrote his ‘I’s, ‘n’s, ‘t’s and so on before tackling the will itself.
Don’t be daunted by age. Sometimes a 16thcentury document can be so beautifully written as to be easier to read than some modern scribble.
MONEY
Besides being a 60s’ drug, LSD was also the acronym for pre-decimal currency of pounds (livres), shillings and pence (dinarii). This was written in a number of different ways; for example, four pounds, two shillings and three pence (‘thruppence’) could be written £4–2–3 or £4 2s 3d or 4l 2s 3d or using Roman numerals – IVl IIs IIId or even IIIJl IJs IIJd.
It is very difficult to find out how much money was worth relative to what it is today. The Bank of England has a ready reckoner and you can also study C. R. Chapman’s How Heavy, How Much and How Long? Weights, Money and Other Measures Used by our Ancestors (Lochin Publishing, 1995) and L. Mumby’s How Much is that Worth? (Phillimore for BALH, 1996).
DATES
Years and days haven’t always been recorded the same way in every country. C. R. Cheney’s Handbook of Dates for Students of English History (CUP, 2000) lists all old forms of dating, including by saints’ days and popes’ and kings’ regnal years.
Years were often counted from the date of a sovereign’s accession, so, for example, the first day of the first year of the reign of Elizabeth II started on 6 February 1952, the day she succeeded her father.
The book also provides a calendar for looking up which day of the week fell in what date in a given year. So, if someone wrote a letter dated 25 May 1657 saying their father died ‘last Monday’ you can find out that 25 May 1657 was a Friday, so ‘last Monday’ must have been 20 May.
OLD STYLE AND NEW STYLE
Britain and Europe used to use the old-style Julian calendar, whereby the year began on Lady Day, 25 March, not the new-style Gregorian calendar, which starts the year on 1 January. The Julian calendar started to die out among lay people in the Tudor period, and by the 18th century it is often hard to tell whether a date is being given in old style or new style.
A member of Pop Gregory’s commision on the calendar pointing out the backslide of the Julian calendar.
Different countries changed to the Gregorian calendar at different times. Most of Western Europe changed in 1582, Scotland in 1600, England and Wales in 1752 and Russia and the Balkans in the 20th century. Therefore, a letter written in France on 1 February 1610 was likely to have been written just under a year before one dated 25 January 1610 in England.
It also means that dates appearing in old records need adjusting to make sense in modern terms. A baptism recorded in a PR on 24 January 1722 would, in modern terms, have taken place on 24 January 1723 because, under the old calendar, New Year’s Day (25 March) had not yet arrived.
To avoid confusion, researchers tend to record the date using ‘double dating’, recording the old-style year followed by the new-style year, i.e. 24 January 1722/3. Never, when you see this, strip out the ‘old’ date and just write 24 January 1723, because someone else may come along, realise that 23 January is before 25 March, not realise that you’ve already adjusted for double dating and write 24 January 1724 instead.
On the International Genealogical and Vital Records indexes (see here), dates are allegedly adjusted but without double dating. Non-conformist registers were using new-style dating well in advance of 1752.
Another difference between the Julian and Gregorian calendars was that the latter used leap years and the former didn’t. By the time Pope Gregory introduced the new calendar in 1582 the lack of leap years had already caused the old-style date to lapse ten days behind the solar year, so he simply ordered ten days to be cut out off 1582, between 4 and 15 October. Because England persisted with the old calendar, it sunk increasingly behind Europe, and was 11 days behind by the 17th century. Therefore, events that share the same dates in different countries, such as the deaths of Shakespeare and Cervantes on 23 April 1616 in England and Spain respectively, actually took place 11 days apart. England and Wales cancelled the days between 2 and 14 September 1752 to catch up with Europe.
COMMON ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMNS
Someone in AGRA or the SoG will know how to work back from GRO records at TNA and PPR and maybe stuff in class WO 97 at TNA (the old PRO) back via the IGI to CMBs taken from PRs or BTs on mf at CROs. I have tried to keep acronymns and abbreviations to a minimum in this book, but here are the main ones I have used together with some additional acronymns you will encounter in the outside world.
| AGRA | Association of Genealogists and Researchers in Archives |
| BT | bishop’s transcript |
| CMB | baptisms, marriages and burials |
| CRO | county record office |
| FFHS | Federation of Family History Societies |
| FHS | Family History Society |
| FRC | Family Records Centre |
| GRO | General Register Office (records are searchable at the FRC) |
| HMC | Historic Manuscripts Commission (now TNA) |
| IGI | International Genealogical Index |
| IHGS | Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies |
| NAS | National Archives of Scotland |
| PCC/PCY | Prerogative Court of Canterbury/York |
| PPR | principal probate registry |
| PR | parish register |
| PRO | Public Records Office (now TNA) |
| PRONI | Public Record Office of Northern Ireland |
| SoG | Society of Genealogists |
| TNA | The National Archives (ex-PRO and HMC) |
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