A new trick

Happy new year to you all. I’m currently working up my goals for the year (on which more later), one of which is to progress with my descendancy of Joseph Bryan Geoghegan. It will be in a private member tree on ancestry, so that I don’t intrude on the privacy of my distant cousins who may not wish me to be poking about in their lineage. It also means I can play about with hypotheticals and alternatives without anybody taking it as gospel and assuming that’s the correct lineage when it may not be – it’s all still quite experimental at the moment!

It’s a work in progress, and I can’t help myself, I have to research as I go. As I input each descendant I find myself trying to get all of their vital info in place and fill in any blanks. And in the course of this, I learnt a handy new trick. I thought I’d share it. Though it may seem rather obvious to some of you, I’d never done it before, and perhaps it will come in handy for someone else too...

The action takes place at freebmd.com. Now, this website is not one I use very often, as the info is all licensed to Ancestry anyway. However, sometimes it’s helpful for double-checking – as I’ve mentioned previously, Ancestry isn’t always accurate.

I was looking for marriages of JBG’s daughter Marion, born 1870. There were two clear favourites. The first was a marriage in 1894 to either Patrick Kavanagh or James Henry Doran, which I’ve narrowed down again to most likely Patrick Kavanagh (as I think I’ve accounted for James Henry Doran and the alternative female spouse on the censuses).

However, the second possibility, in 1888, was one of those pesky marriages where the transcription info for the volume and/or page number is incomplete, so Ancestry can’t give you the usual list of others appearing on the original page. I’d just left this until now, but I decided to investigate further using freebmd. They had the exact same transcription error, and so I decided to follow their troubleshooting advice, and search by possible page numbers within the known volume for the date and place you need. (Ancestry won’t let you search by volume or page number.)

Helpfully it tells you what the expected range is, so you don’t have to search indefinitely. For example, my error was an unknown first digit: 8c _02 – but freebmd told me that the expected page range  for the district was, e.g., 327 to 544 – so it could only really be 402 or 502. I searched both sets of page references, but annoying they both had complete pairs on the page, so no spouses left unaccounted for to match up with Marion.

I went back to Marion again, and discovered that freebmd will let you see the original page scan – as, of course, does Ancestry – and so I was able to ascertain that the page number definitely read 502. I can see why the poor transcriber (is that right – surely it should be like scribe – a transcribe?) went wrong, because it did sort of look like a three, but if you knew that the expected page range didn’t include 302 then it was fairly obvious!

I soon realised that the only explanation for the lack of potential spouses appearing was that the one of the spouses on that page had been mistranscribed as well. Note, not necessarily Marion’s husband.

So, what to do now? I could just order the certificate, of course, but a) it would cost me, and b) given that Marion is only 18 at this point, it seems to me that the 1894 marriage is more likely and thus it would be a waste of time and money when I all I really need is to be able to identify the couple on the census and ascertain that this other Marion née Geoghegan is the wrong age (or from the wrong place, or whatever else). And c) where would be the fun in that, when I can surely solve the riddle using my wits, for free?

Frustratingly, BMD won’t allow you to ‘wildcard’ a volume number or page number, otherwise I might have found him in three moves: *02, 5*2, 50*. However – and this is the nifty bit – it will let you search for all the entries in a given volume for a given date and place – i.e. you can leave the page number blank. I tried it the other way around as well, and yes, you can search on page number without volume number – but as the volume numbers are less variable, it’s probably not so useful!

This search brought up a list of all the marriages registered in volume 4c in Bolton in March 1888. It’s long, but not so unwieldy that it takes long to complete the task, which is to run your eye down the column of page numbers, looking out for anything suspicious. It only took me a minute or so to spot him: Thomas Relpf, as the transcription had him, was apparently on page 5_2. Opening the original image I could see that this page number did indeed read 502, and his name was Relph, not Relpf.

So, the complete set of people on page 502 is George Hodson, Margaret Ann Johnson, Marion Geoghegan and Thomas Relph. Now to find out who is married to whom... I’ll let you know!

I was also able to fix all of the other errors in the volume. I include them here:

Robert Hamer (3_4)­­ is the missing spouse from page 384 (William Lee King; Belinda Glover; Alice Ann Harwood).

Mary Ellen Hilton (3[56]0) is the missing spouse from page 350 (Thomas Atkinson, Martha Hannah Blake, Isaac Hill) – page 360 doesn’t exist.

Elizabeth Ratcliffe (3[41]1) is the missing spouse from page 341 (James Ball, Thomas Bogle, Mary Jane Faulkner) – page 311 doesn’t exist.

And finally, as the only two illegible reference numbers that didn’t match anything else, they must match each other: Thomas Holden ([3 ]*A) and Sarah Jane Holt (*) – both have been added to the bottom of their respective index pages in pen; it seems likely that they were indeed the same certificate, presumably somehow missed out during the original indexing.

It’s lost on me why this isn’t done by freebmd as part of a transcription check. It took me all of about 15 minutes to check and resolve these missing spouses from the pages. It’s probably not completely error-proof. The last one might be a bit speculative ­– if you had two such issues on a page you would struggle to iron it out without recourse to the censuses and you could still get it wrong. However, the other three were simple enough, and a little more time spent resolving this kind of thing would make it far less taxing to find a spouse! I suppose as always, time and resources are the difficulties.

L x

Detective work 5. Trust your instincts

Instinct is a very important facet of genealogical research. I have often found that even before I can prove a theory I instinctively know that it’s correct. Or, I can see the plausibility of a theory, but yet somehow my gut is telling me that it’s just not right. This is particularly true when it comes to ordering birth, marriage and death certificates. Faced with three possibilities and no strong clues, how else do you decide where to start, other than to follow your instincts?

I think the thing to remember is that your instincts aren’t ‘psychic’ but rooted in your deep subconscious. If you have a strong feeling, it’s probably because it ‘fits’ with what you already know about your family, even if it’s not a tangible fact, but more the sense of identity you have. Perhaps some tiny memory of something someone once said or a picture you saw, even if we can’t pinpoint it now, is what is guiding you in these situations?

However, it’s equally important not to let your instincts override logic too much, because, of course they can be wrong. Make sure that each theory you come up with is backed up by good evidence before you build on it further. You just need to follow your instincts to find the evidence first, so once you get that ‘I just know I’m right’ feeling, get to work proving it!

L x

Detective work 4. Location, location, location

It’s one of the most frustrating things to have to deal with – your ancestor goes a-wandering but you have no idea to where.  It can be tricky but there are a few things worth considering.

Firstly, identify the most likely places your ancestors would move to. The foremost reason they would move is for work, so look at areas where there might have been similar employment – textiles workers might move from the Cotswolds to Yorkshire or Lancashire, coal miners from South Wales to the North-East, and of course just about everyone was pouring from the countryside into the cities. Look for common migration patterns from your area of interest – where were other people from that area going? Some basic historical research might give you some interesting possibilities.

It’s also worth considering other possibilities though. They might have moved to the area that their spouse came from. Bear in mind also that sometimes women would go back to their family in order to have the baby, so keep an eye out for people living in one region but born in another, to find out where their family might originate from. On the other hand, families often tended to move together, so if you find a sibling who has moved away, look nearby for people who seem to be missing from their original location. Also, sometimes you get grandchildren living with grandparents or other family members, which might give some indication of where someone has moved to or from.

Bear in mind that the further away an ancestor moves from the place they were born, the vaguer the census entry for place of birth may be. Census enumerators were unlikely to have been familiar with far-off localities, so often just wrote down larger places they had heard of or even just the county. Sometimes it all gets a bit muddled for no apparent reason. Don’t discount a possible ancestor just because his or her place of birth is a little off!

On the other hand, look out for recurring locations and addresses – if there seems to be a pattern, it’s highly unlikely that it’s random. Families would often move very short distances within their locale, so if there’s someone with the same family name on the same street, there’s a strong chance their connected somehow, even if you can’t figure it out yet. Similarly, I often find children who marry end up living very lose to their parents, so if you can’t track a marriage down, try looking at the neighbours of known family for possibilities.

L x

Detective work 3. If the date fits...

Dates are, of course, the backbone of ancestral research – they are essentially the thing we are looking for, and the more we can narrow them down the better. This is why I think looking at dates in context is really important: a genealogical reconstruction of events, if you will.

Keep an eye out for any specific date you can attach to your ancestor, even if it’s not an event that has much effect on their own life. Even just a passing mention can help give you some clues as to where your ancestor was and what they were doing at that time

As part of my indexing project I am creating a timeline for each ancestor and plotting as many events onto it that might have been relevant to their life as possible. It’s easier in some cases than others. In my own family tree, Amy Hall, the eldest sister of my 2x great grandmother Mabel, was a touring actress, and theatre archives enable me to pinpoint her movements pretty much continuously for twenty-four years, even though I can’t positively identify her on two out of the four possible censuses in her lifetime. (Frustratingly, in 1911 I know where she was just two days before the census was taken, but no luck so far...) A more general set of records you might be able to achieve something similar with is the electoral rolls.

This ‘time-lining’ been quite an eye-opener, just in terms of the new perspective it has given me – people having children just days before the death of a parent or even a spouse, for example. All too often, I think, we consider an individual ancestors life as self-contained, whereas in fact the lives of their family would have had a huge impact on them. A more careful consideration of this could bring all sorts of new possibilities to life, particularly those details beyond the fundamentals of birth, marriage and death.

Individual dates also have their uses as well. One of the most important ways to use dates though is to look out for larger gaps between siblings and consider why this might be. Did their parents have other children? Were the parents apart for a period – for work, in the military, even in prison...?

It’s also worth picking apart the various birth years given for children on censuses to narrow them down a bit. Logically, your ancestor is just as likely to have been born the year before the census entry suggests, because they turned the age they are on the census any time in the year leading up to that point. As the census tends to be taken in the first half of the year, this means that someone who is aged twenty on the 1881 census was born in either early 1861 or late 1860. Considering when the census was taken and any discrepancies in ages on various censuses and other documents can help you narrow down a likely birth date. Alternatively work through the data for an entire family or families to weed out errors and identify likely records where there are multiple possibilities. Check out On James Wade, mason for one of my attempts at this!

L x

Detective work 2. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know...

Or rather it’s who your ancestors knew!

Pay attention to the families living close by on the census, everyone in the household – even unrelated people, and most definitely the servants! If you’re struggling to locate a family on the census, but you know where they were living ten years before or after, try searching for their neighbours – it may be that they’ve been mistranscribed, but they’re still living in the same house. I have found this to be a much faster way of locating people than browsing a census manually to find the right address.

Also keep an eye on marriage witnesses and will executors. They often crop up multiple times, and can help to confirm family links. For example, I recently confirmed that I had indeed found the right female ancestor because her spouse appeared as a witness at the marriage of her younger sibling. It’s hardly surprising really. Intermarriage between two families brings them together and creates new alliances. Or, there was already a level of friendship between the families, which was part of the reason for the marriage in the first place!

One of my ancestors, the travelling actor William Hayward (AKA Hedgcock) was a nightmare to locate. I only had him on the 1901 census, living in a boarding house. There was one other actor also living there, and I managed to find someone researching this man. They weren’t able to say whether or not there was a link between them, unfortunately, but it was worth a shot.

I keep a list of all the theatrical people I come across in my research on this branch of the family, because I spend quite a bit of time on message boards / forums full of people looking for theatrical ancestors, you never know when I might be able to lend a helping hand. For example, I found an 1891 census transcription of one Frank B Audas (and family). I was sure it was wrong, couldn’t decipher it from the original entry myself either, but when I was then tracing my own ancestor’s theatrical career through the Stage archives, I was able to find the right name: Frank Danvers. I very much doubt that anyone out there looking for Mr Danvers would have searched for him as Audas, so hopefully one day this useful snippet will come into its own...

I always feel that what goes around comes around – the more you can do to help other people in their research, the better it is for your own. Evidently, the ‘it’s not what you know, it’s who you know’ mantra doesn’t just apply to your ancestors, it applies to you too! Get talking to older family members, or, if they’re not around, maybe someone knows of an old family friend. You might even be able to track down some distant cousins who are involved in the family tree, or simply someone who knows something you don’t! Think of all of these people as your ‘witnesses’, and interview them with care!

L x

Detective work 1. The clue's in the name...

We all know that genealogy is about fact-finding and evidence. But sometimes when that evidence just doesn’t present itself, we have to turn detective in order to make that crucial leap forward.

First of all, names:

It was traditional, in the Christian religion at least, to name your children after your parents, so it’s always helpful to look at children’s names to help you get back a generation, particularly the older ones. It can be particularly helpful if you have two possible sets of parents for your ancestor, to look at what that ancestor named their children. Of course, you do need to take into consideration that there are four grandparents for whom they might be named – but then that might be twice the help, if you’re lucky!

Similarly, middle names often pass through families, and can be really useful when matching up parents and children. It can also be a bit of clue to a mother’s maiden name, particularly if it’s not a traditional Christian name. 

Then there are those generic family names. Examples from my own family tree include Honor and Ezra Hampshire, both of which occur more the once across the Hampshire generations. Particularly in an area where there are apparently distinct families with the same surname, this can be a really useful way of starting to group them together.

Both middle names and children’s names, can also be used this to identify possible cousins. You can then work back that way to find the common grandparent. Remember, just because you can’t make the link back from your ancestor doesn’t mean you couldn’t find a way back from a possible cousin!

Of course, there’s always the possibility that the clue is absolutely not in the name. Name changes can be a nightmare! Christian names were shortened in a variety of ways, some of which seem completely arbitrary: Mary or Mary Ann often became Polly for instance. Bear in mind too that Harry can be short of Henry or Harold, Teddy for Theodore or Edward, and Elizabeth can be shortened in an almost infinite number of ways.

Similarly, surnames change for lots of reasons – oddities of spelling are especially common, from a time when a lot of people were illiterate and before spellings generally became standardised. Often these are unpredictable – I’ve come across spellings of names that I would never have thought to search for in all of my ‘wildcard’ attempts! People might adopt an alias or a stage name, and women remarrying might do so under their maiden name or their former married name, and sometimes both. Illegitimate children might take their mother’s name, their real father’s name or a step-father’s name at any point in their lives. Switching between names was not uncommon.

Basically, you have to keep an open mind. Just because the name is different doesn’t mean it’s not them. Weigh up all the other factors before dismissing them.

L x