Published in
the September 2009 edition of 'The Genealogist'
The
other day at the
Society of Genealogists I overheard an Australian accent, which of
course immediately made me sit up and take notice. A lady was
looking for her ancestor, John Smith of all names, and she was being
given assistance by the Society staff. She clearly had not done
enough research before making this trip of a lifetime, so even without
the prospect of searching for John Smith, she was always going to
struggle.
It turned out she had some clues from a newspaper obituary, but there
were all sorts of other records which she could have followed up before
coming over here. The obituary helpfully gave his place of birth,
although just how accurate that will have been some 90 years after the
event is a moot point, and it does not seem to have been so in this
case. But it also named brothers with whom he was supposed to
have emigrated, and their details could have been a useful boost to the
search.
A little later on I came across her again, and asked how she was
getting on. Not too well, as it turned out, but there were some
possibly interesting entries. I saw the notes she had brought
over with her, and her results, and then realised that she had my own
family there. It turned out she was my second cousin Anne who I
had not seen for at least 40 years, so that was a bit of a surprise,
and just shows how small this world can be at times.
Now I will encourage Anne to join a family history society and use the
facilities they have to offer, so as to gather up some detail on the
family before jumping into such deep water. Even if the ancestor
is not John Smith, there are a lot of people and places over here and
we need to gather together as much information as possible before even
thinking of trying to take the search to places beyond Australia.
Those who do have their roots in England and Wales will have used the
National Burial Index, published on disc by the Federation of Family
History Societies. The current second edition has over 13 million
names, and has proved to be very useful in locating our dead
ancestors. A new edition is due within the next few months, and
will have some 18 million entries. It is bound to open up new
areas of research, the burial or death being something that is often
overlooked. It is all too easy to find a likely marriage, then go
back to a baptism, and add those to the family tree. A burial
entry should match up with the date of baptism but all too often the
burial index will reveal that the ‘ancestor’ died as an infant.
Anyway, I am looking forward to the new edition, as entries for my
favourite counties of Northumberland and Durham will rise from a little
over 600,000 to over a million, so there could be some interesting new
records for me.
We are all revelling in the completion of the 1911 census
project. Wales has recently come along, with records of the Royal
Navy and army units abroad. As I write, the Enumerators’ Summary
Books are being released too. These will be especially useful
when a person is found to be in an institution, or living at their
place of work, or a house was uninhabited. The ESBs have a list
of the schedules issued for each enumeration book with the name of the
head of each, so empty houses can be spotted. I am looking
forward to sorting out some people who have been recorded at their
place of work, but where the summary provided by the main census index
does not make clear just which building the people are working and
living at.
It seems that when the 1911 census schedules were delivered to
households there was a fair amount of confusion as to the answers
required. There are plenty of cases of widows helpfully giving
numbers of children born to and length of the ‘present marriage’ – in
theory these should have been nil answers, given that the marriage had
finished. But the form also asked for the number of dead children
in the marriage, and some took it upon themselves to name these dead
children, so there is the potential for lots of useful additional
information in the records.
While on census records, the 1871 maps which the enumerators used to
plan the taking of the census, have been digitised for sale by Cassini
at www.cassinimaps.co.uk
and might make an interesting addition to the family record. The
original records are at The National Archives, along with huge
collections of other maps, from the United Kingdom and all over the
world.
I have mentioned the British Postal Museum and Archive in these pages
before. They hold appointment records for pretty well all
employees since 1831. There are indexes to these, and a postman
can be traced through his career from the records. ‘Ancestors’
magazine (from The National Archives) for July 2009 notes that the
records are to be placed online by Ancestry.co.uk so that will open up
another potential area of research for some people.
Indexes to the Scottish birth, marriage and death records have long
been available online at www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/
but the indexes have now been extended. Births and deaths are now
available to 2006, and marriages since 1933 are due later this
year. These fill longstanding gaps in the indexes and will help
tracing down the present.
The web site also now has images of the 1881 census for Scotland.
Until now these have only been available as transcripts, with all the
errors in interpretation that come with such records. Now we can
see the original entries and make our own judgement.
The published lists of alumni at the University of Cambridge down to
1900 have been around for many years, and are now online at
Ancestry. But another version has been released at www.venn.csi.cam.ac.uk/
which includes women students. Women were first admitted at the
university in 1882 but they were not admitted as full members until
1947.
For a month now we have had notice from The National Archives that some
changes to their service were to be announced at the beginning of
July. Just the thing to set the rumour-mongers going! But
just as I send this off, the news has come through that the reading
rooms at Kew are to be closed on Mondays, and that there will be
charges to use the car park there.
I tend to go to Kew on Tuesdays or Thursdays, when they are open from
9am to 7pm, so Mondays will not bother me at all unless the
concentration of the same number of readers into one less day per week
leads to overcrowding. We have recently had document production
times extended from about half an hour to an hour, and it might be that
more of this is to come. But, perhaps more seriously, you have to
wonder what staff cuts will come on the back of the reduced
hours. There are people there who have expert knowledge of
specialised areas such as the army, shipping or legal records and it
would be devastating to lose these members of staff. The
justification for the cuts in hours is that so much is being accessed
online now, but of course the simple reduction of costs or raising of
revenue from other sources has to be the driving force in these
difficult economic times.
We can only hope that this will keep the accountants happy for a while,
and that nothing more serious will be put forward.
Meanwhile, even if your ancestor is not John Smith but something much
more unusual, do keep in mind the need to check every possible record
at every step in your research so that you are not faced with deciding
on between two or 22 possible entries. And if you are making that
research trip to Europe, do make sure of the opening hours of the
archives you wish to use. Kew will not be the first to reduce
their hours to save a few pounds.