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Letter
from England
from 'The Genealogist' by Peter Bennett Published in
the September 2009 edition of 'The Genealogist'
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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. Happy searching. Peter Bennett |
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