Another weapon for your arsenal

So, here’s the background: I was trying to help solve a small mystery posted on a LinkedIn group. I spent some time scrolling through the 1851 census on Ancestry at the weekend, but yesterday I started Googling for other options to see if perhaps we were dealing with an Ancestry mistranscription that was correct elsewhere.

I was specifically looking for census transcriptions for the areas they were living in, to see if we could check out their last known addresses and future know addresses – it’s notoriously hard to work by address on Ancestry, as it takes ages to find the right page.

However, what I found was www.ukcensusonline.co.uk, which popped up in the advertisements at the top of Google’s search. I thought I’d try it, since it claimed free access. It doesn’t do what I wanted to, but it is really very helpful.

The great thing about this census website is that you initially just pick a census year and search on a name. What you get is a basic, easy-to-read list including the following: forename, surname, age, occupation, county, estimated year of birth and place of birth. You can then ‘select a record set’, which basically allows you to filter by county. The numbers of the name in each county are given in brackets alongside.

I know it sounds fairly standard, but in fact it’s brilliant as an ‘at-a-glance’ tool.

On Ancestry you have to hover over each search result to get the crucial details, and often you can’t find the occupation without going into the image itself. Here it’s given to you up-front, which it makes it so much easier to locate the right person when we’re dealing with common names. In this respect it definitely trumps Ancestry.

UK census online also ‘wildcards’ the search (unless you ask it not to), as does Ancestry. But because their basic search doesn’t include any other criteria, what you get is a comprehensive list of possibilities with all their basic data there at a glance. And because it isn’t attempting to then organise your results by relevance, you’re not likely to miss anyone out.

I often find myself frustrated by Ancestry’s search, because if you put in multiple details, for example place and date of birth, it may bring up people born around the right time in the wrong place as more likely matches than someone who is born in exactly the right place but their birth date is out by a few years, or vice versa. Using UK census online’s basic search you get a simple list of possibilities, and it’s left to your brain as opposed to the computer to identify the right one.

The option to easily filter by county makes it easier to whittle down your options and perhaps check multiple locations without having to restart your search. It would also be a useful tool for finding out where specific surnames were most common at any given time, for example, so as to give you an idea where to conduct your search if you were completely clueless about location.

Of course, you could just search by name on Ancestry as well, but then the results aren’t so easy to scroll through, so you wouldn’t necessarily make your life any easier. One of the key strengths of this website is the very clear column-style layout of the list you get, which you can just run your eye down.

The limitations of this site are, firstly that you have to subscribe in order to be able to access the record from this search and to be able to conduct a more detailed search. As I haven’t subscribed (as yet ­– I’ll see how useful I find it), I can’t tell you how well the detailed search function works or what the standard of the images is.

Of course, without being able to click into the record, it’s harder to spot possibly mistranscribed people – for example if you had struggled to find someone on ancestry, but here you thought you had spotted them by their occupation but their age was wrong, you wouldn’t easily be able to check the original image. You would have to go and search for them on Ancestry or wherever and hope that they had the same error. And if it’s a transcription error you’re trying to confirm, you can’t be sure that you’re going to find them, because they may not have made the same one. Hopefully you’d have enough info from the record to search by, but what if other errors have been made? I suppose that if this particular situation arose I’d end up subscribing just to get the access I wanted, but it’s not really ideal financially. I’d prefer the credits option, like you used to get on the old 1911 census.

The other issue is identifying family members; again, you need record access to do this – though the same can generally be said of any website you’re not subscribing to, of course. With the original 1911 census, if I knew of household members I was expecting to find, but didn’t want to pay for the record, I would just search for them and see if there were matching possibilities in the same location as my original – easy enough if you’re looking for unusual names, but perhaps tricky otherwise.

I can tell you, however, that finding the answer to the above mystery (sadly a ‘no’, the person we were searching for doesn’t seem to be there) took me about ten minutes of scrolling through the results list, compared to an hour or so of flicking through the possibilities using various different combinations of search criteria on Ancestry – talk about a timesaver!

This site will be my go-to at-a-glance census searcher in future; I urge you to check it out and see if it can help you out too!

L x

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 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

On my friend Google

We all use Google routinely outside of our genealogical research, but I argue that we should be using it as a fundamental part of our research as well. You should be Googling all of your ancestors, and regularly. Here are a few Google Search tips that you might find useful:

If you didn’t already know, putting whatever you’re Googling in double quotation marks will make sure you get that exact phrase. (Single quotation marks won’t work.) For example, if I Google Joseph Bryan Geoghegan, I will get pages containing those individual words, but not necessarily as one complete name. If I Google “Joseph Bryan Geoghegan” I will only get those three words grouped together in that exact order.

In order to make the most use of this, however, I should also be searching him as “Geoghegan Joseph Bryan” “Joseph B. Geoghegan” “J. B. Geoghegan”, “Geoghegan J. B.”, etc. I should also be trying it without quotation marks as well, obviously. Googling an individual is much more time-consuming than you might think, but it can have fantastic results.

I recently discovered that you can also search on numeric ranges, using ellipses (...). So you could search Joseph Bryan Geoghegan 1812...1890 (no spaces before or after ellipses), to search for dates that fall within his lifetime. If a reference isn’t dated it won’t come up, and it does only mean within the page, content, so it’s not 100% accurate, but I’ve found it useful.

Use the minus symbol (-) to omit results that contain a certain word. Search Geoghegan –Ireland (Space after Geoghegan, no space between – and Ireland) to omit all results for Geoghegan containing the word Ireland.

Use the tilde symbol (~) (located on shift+# on my keyboard) to denote ‘similar to’ in a search.  So, ~genealogy (no space) searches on family history, family tree, vital records, census, etc. You can also use it before a URL in the Google search box to identify similar web pages: a search for ~www.ancestry.co.uk brings up find my past, 1911 census and various other useful genealogy webpages.

Finally, Google will generate definitions using define: followed by search term. E.g. define:genealogy  (no space). I have found this search useful for unusual occupations, for example.

Google has other handy functions too. Google Map is indispensable for finding out where exactly your ancestry locations are. Use the ‘get directions’ function to get a rough idea how far away places are from one another. If you’ve got an exact address, try streetview.  It’s not quite as good as being there, but you can get a feel for the area at least!

Google Images can also give you useful stuff. Though you’re fairly unlikely to find a photo of an ancestor, you can easily find old photographs of locations, or photographs from the same era to see styles of clothing, for example – helpful for comparisons if you’re trying to work out the date of an old photo.

I also use Google Calendar to store key dates, which I have then used with a Blogger application to generate the Calendar that appears on this page.

Finally, if you need to share genealogy documents with others online, Google Documents is a pretty good way to do so, though I have had issues with the upload tool. You can the link to this by email or within a blog or other webpage.

L x

Five top tips for finding your ancestors

1. Google them repeatedly.

And check other websites regularly as well, obviously. The internet changes every day, you never know when things will have been updated. I go back to the same sites again and again, and Google the same things often over time, just to see what new info is thrown up – you’d be surprised! Google is possibly the ultimate tool for a genealogist – I’ll talk a bit more about making the most of it another time.

2. Buy their certificates.

I know it can be pricey, but it is worth it. I admit, I don’t have all of the ones I want yet, but I intend to get them. There’s nothing like seeing your ancestor’s handwriting – you can also compare this against other examples of their handwriting if necessary too. (Or seeing the ‘X’ and realising they’re illiterate – equally useful and interesting.) They are invaluable in checking and confirming your information; things can be mis-transcribed all too easily. And they’ll stop you assuming someone is your ancestor when they’re not.

3. Record your non-ancestors too.

If you find an individual and a family who you a) have confirmed aren’t connected for whatever reason or b) thought might be yours, but then turn out not to be – take note. The mistakes you make and then rectify are equally a part of your genealogical ‘journey’; cheesy but true nonetheless.  On a more practical note, it means you have a definitive record of people you’ve discounted, that you can check future possibilities against. Plus, you never know when someone might contact you wondering if you’re connected to them, and instead of just saying ‘no’, you can say ‘no, but is this a possible candidate?’ – and then hopefully karma will return the favour for you someday too!

4. Don’t ignore their siblings!

I’ve got a real bee in my bonnet about this – see On siblings and extended family. What I would say is, take the time to work through them, even if it’s just basic names and birthdates, and see how much easier it then makes it to see the direct line afterwards. In an area where there are lots of people with the same surname, and half of them have the same Christian name too (Mary, anyone? I think I must have at least 20 different Marys in my tree!) it can make all the difference. It’s like undoing a giant knot – time consuming and frustrating, but ultimately the only way you’re going to get to the one thread you’re after!

5. Broaden your parameters.

If you can’t find an ancestor based on what you think you know about them, take it away. I know that Ancestry and other websites are constantly telling you that ‘even a guess can help’ – but sometimes a guess can be such a hindrance! Can’t find an ancestor? Take letters out of names, take away birth dates and places, triple check everything in handwriting for possible spelling and/or transcription errors. Search for every member of a household using the minimum possible information, even ones who you suspect might be dead or living elsewhere. The tiniest clues can help. You will find them somewhere!

Happy hunting!

L x