Genealogy | The National Archives blog

Posts tagged 'Genealogy'

Mon Nov

2012

Missing from the census?

Posted by Audrey Collins in Records and research

All family historians use the census, and most of us find most of what we want, most of the time. This is of course due to the fact that every census for England and Wales has been indexed; sometimes you even have a number of versions to choose from, so if you don’t find a person on one website, you might find them on another. Where the handwriting is hard to read, it all comes down to interpretation.

But sometimes, despite your best efforts, a person or a family stubbornly refuses to be found. You might even have tried searching for them ‘the old-fashioned way’. That is, searching by address, assuming you have some indication of where they were living at the time of the census, and that they either lived in a village or there is a street index for their town. That was the usual way of finding someone in the census until just over a decade ago.

If you have exhausted all the possibilities of using name indexes, including possible mis-spellings and mis-transcriptions, you are left with a dwindling number of possibilities, which fall into three catagories:

They are there, you just can’t see them
They are missing from the census altogether
They are, or rather were, in the census but in a part of it that has since gone missing Continue reading »

Fri Nov

2012

My Tommy’s War: An Eastender in the Lancers

Posted by Caroline James in Records and research

12th (Prince of Wales's) Lancers Group - Photograph from private collection

At The National Archives we are busy planning our programme of activities to commemorate the centenary of the First World War in 2014.

With our unique and extensive collection of First World War records, from the official unit war diaries to medal cards and records of the men and women who served, we hold an invaluable resource for genealogists, historians, scholars and anyone interested in researching the history of this conflict or the people involved.

In this blog series, we will follow a group of volunteers from our staff as they embark on a voyage of discovery to trace their First World War ancestors using records held by The National Archives. At regular intervals over the next two years, each will write a blog to explain what records they have consulted, what they found about their ancestor and how they intend to continue their research in this and other archives. They will also share hints and tips to help others conduct their own research.

We hope you will come with us on the journey to discover our ancestors. With the approaching centenary, at no time has it been more fitting to discover the people behind those old photographs and medals.

As the person overseeing this series, I thought it only fair to be the first to post. Read on to see what I found out about my Tommy…

Fri Oct

2012

Appealing against conscription? Not just for conscientious objectors

Posted by Chris Barnes and David Langrish in Records and research

On the 27January 1916 the Military Service Act came into force in the United Kingdom (except Ireland), making every unmarried male aged between 18 and 41 (who was not in a reserved occupation) eligible for conscription into the armed forces.

Example of a certificate

Men could apply to their local military tribunals for some manner of exemption based on a variety of grounds. Many men subsequently appealed this local tribunal decision, with appeal hearings held at County Appeal tribunals. After the war it was decided that only a sample of records from the Central Tribunal in London and the papers from the Middlesex County Appeal tribunal should be kept as a benchmark for England and Wales. It is these papers which make up record series MH 47 here at The National Archives.

These papers contain a wealth of personal information relating to the applicants, their jobs and their families. Currently the collection is underused due to its complex arrangement and convoluted indexing system. By making these papers name searchable and providing digital access we are hoping to open up these records to a much wider audience and open up another valuable First World War resource to those who have been frustrated in their search for a military service record.

Fri Oct

2012

The National Archives of…where, exactly?

Posted by Audrey Collins in Records and research

People sometimes comment on the fact that we are called ‘The National Archives’ and not ‘The National Archives of…’ If you look at the Who we are page of our website you will see that ‘The National Archives is the official archive and publisher for the UK government, and for England and Wales.’ Or, to put it another way, some of our records cover only England and Wales, and some cover the whole of the United Kingdom. So far, so good, but then you have to remember that the United Kingdom has changed over time; it came into existence until 1707, with the Union of the English and Scottish parliaments, to which Ireland was added in 1801. Most of Ireland gained its independence under the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, and forms of devolved government were established in Scotland and Wales in 1999 with the re-introduction of a Scottish Parliament and the new Welsh Assembly.

For a student of history this is interesting – I was interested enough to take a course called ‘Territory and Power in the UK’ in my final year at university – but it’s also important for a genealogist to know about the history of the United Kingdom and its constituent parts. Two of those constituent parts, Scotland and Northern Ireland, also have their own national archive bodies, the National Records of Scotland (NRS) and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI); Wales has been entirely under the control of England and its legal system since 1282 and does not have a national archive, but it does have the National Library of Wales.

Frederick James Allison from the Registry of Seamen in BT 350

If you have English ancestry you need to work out which records are held locally in county record offices, and which records are here in The National Archives, but if you are researching Welsh, Scottish or Irish families you might also need to work out which national repository you need to consult. People researching their Irish ancestry are often particularly surprised to discover just how many Irish records we hold here, and yet The National Archives rarely features in lists of major resources or websites for Irish research.

The Irish Diaspora is particularly large, since Ireland once had a large population but which dropped dramatically from the 1840s onwards, mostly due to emigration. In 1841 there were 8.2 million people in Ireland, compared to England’s 15.9 million, but by 1911 this had fallen to 4.4 million while England’s population had more than doubled to 36.1 million. As a result, there are far more people outside Ireland with Irish ancestry than there are in Ireland. They may not be aware, at least to start with, that Ireland was part of the UK during the time period they are researching. I have no such excuse, having lived in the UK all my life, but I didn’t realise just how much we had until I started gathering material for a talk on Irish records in The National Archives, which I first delivered about 8 years ago.

Mon Sep

2012

260 years of double-dating

Posted by Audrey Collins in Records and research

September 1752 was a very short month. In fact, it was 11 days shorter than the average September, to bring the United Kingdom into line with most of the rest of Europe. In fact, there were three separate calendars in use in 18^th century Europe; Catholic states had generally adopted the new (and astronomically more accurate) Gregorian calendar in place of the Julian calendar the 16^th century, Protestant states took it up in the 18^th century while the Orthodox Christian countries of Russia, Greece and the Balkan states did not come into line until the early 20^th century.

This can lead to misunderstandings over dates in historical documents, especially before September 1752. In that year, 2 September was immediately followed by 14 September, which must have caused some difficulty for anyone for whom one of the ‘missing’ days had some significance, like a birthday or a legal contract. As well as the loss of 11 days to bring the days into line with those countries already using the Gregorian calendar, the other major change adopted was that the start of the year was now 1 January, and not 25 March, or Lady Day.

Independent chapel Wrentham, Suffolk: baptism register

If you look at early church registers of baptisms, marriages and burials you can easily see when the new year begins, as in this example from the baptism register of the Independent chapel at Wrentham, Suffolk. But if you see a reference just to a single entry dated between 1 January and 24 March, perhaps on a family tree, it might not be obvious whether the date is exactly as it appears in the register, or has been adjusted to conform with the Gregorian calendar. This is where the ‘double-dating’ comes in. To avoid any ambiguity, the correct way to express one of these dates is in the format ‘20 March 1698/99’. This register also provides an interesting example of ‘double-dating’ at the bottom of the page, in acknowledgement of the fact that there was an alternative system of dating in existence.

From 14 September onwards dating is a much simpler business, but there was still scope for confusion. Countries where Orthodox Christianity prevailed continued to use their own calendar for much longer, so dates of events taking place in those countries need to be treated with care. Registers of British consulates and churches in those countries habitually used both dates for events registered there, such as this entry from the register of the British consulate in St Petersburg recording the death of Henry Thornley, who died on 19 or 31 March 1872. Continue reading »

Tue Aug

2012

My ancestor was… a traffic officer. How the UK Government Web Archive might help the family and social historians of the future

Posted by Claire Newing in Records and research, Technology and innovation

Not long after I joined The National Archives someone asked me whether I thought there was any point archiving the ‘job vacancies’ or ‘careers’ sections of government websites. The person who asked felt these sections contained current information which would not be of interest once the posts advertised had been filled. As someone with an interest in both family and social history I disagreed. Although the ‘current vacancies’ section of a website archived 18 months ago probably would not be the most popular resource, I believe that this and other content related to work and employment captured in the web archive will be invaluable to the historians of the future.

The world of work is hugely important to family and social historians. A person’s job can tell us a great deal about their life. It can indicate their status in society, what quality of life they had and how educated they were, amongst other things. Most family historians researching in the UK will first find out about the occupations of their ancestors from a few words on a birth, marriage or death certificate or from a census return. Sometimes it is fairly obvious what the job entailed: my own family tree features a bus driver, a chauffeur, a cricket ball maker and a vast number of agricultural labourers, but some are more of a puzzle ¹. The first image below is taken from my grandparents’ 1941 marriage certificate. My grandmother’s father’s occupation is given as ‘Carter’. A quick poll of colleagues in my office (none of whom are family history experts, I hasten to add) demonstrated that none of them knew what being a carter would entail. Continue reading »

Notes:

1. Agricultural labourer was such a common occupation in England in the 19th century and earlier that my colleague Mark Pearsall gave a whole public talk about researching them ^

Mon Aug

2012

A singular name

Posted by Audrey Collins in Records and research

‘A Somerset House clerk once declared that the tedium of his labour on the registry of births and deaths is often relieved by coming across a humorous juxtaposition of names…then the face of the clerk will be covered with a smile.’

A General Register Office clerk at Somerset House

So began an article in Cassell’s New Penny Magazine in 1899. For ‘Somerset house clerk’ you could substitute anyone who works with lists of names on a daily basis. This has been my lot for most of my working life, first in customer accounts for a major department store, then as a professional genealogist and now as part of my job here at The National Archives.

One of the things that we do when we are not on public duty is cataloguing, and I recently joined the team working on the School Admission Records among the papers of the Royal Greenwich Hospital in series ADM 73. These are interesting records in themselves, often containing copies of birth, baptism and marriage certificates, service details and correspondence. But, as in the case of the man at Somerset House, this clerk’s face was covered with a smile on discovering the best name I have seen in a long time – Singular Onion Gallehawk. I had to read it a couple of times to be sure I wasn’t mistaken, but the writing was very clear.

Naturally, I had to find out more. On applying for a place in the school for their child, parents were asked for the names of any other children they had, which told me that John James Gallehawk, a customs officer, and his wife Effield had named their other children Cassandra, Lorenzo, Arthur, Olive and Hamilton. Since the children were born in the 1840s and 1850s I easily found the index entry for the parents’ marriage on FreeBMD which revealed that Effield’s maiden surname was Onion, which at least explains young Singular’s middle name. As forenames go, Singular is extremely rare, but not unique – or, if you prefer, not strictly ‘singular’ at all. According to FreeBMD, which is close to being a complete record of all birth, marriage and death entries in England and Wales from 1837 until about the Second World War, there were six people with Singular as a first or middle name, one of them being Edward Singular Onion. Searches of worldwide databases FamilySearch.org (free) and Ancestry.com (a subscription site) reveal a few more instances of the name, but not many. Within England and Wales, the name appears almost exclusively in Kent, Essex, London and the south coast. People (of both sexes) bearing his mother’s forename, Effield, are a little more numerous, but are still rare. It is more common as a surname, concentrated in the Lincolnshire area.

Wed Jul

2012

Distress in the cotton districts 1863

Posted by Audrey Collins in Records and research

Spinning mules from Chambers' 'Information for the People' 1856

A century and a half ago, the American Civil War was well under way, and its devastating consequences for that country are well-known. But the conflict had serious repercussions on this side of the Atlantic, too. The cotton industry in north west England was dependent on supplies of raw cotton from the southern states, and when this supply was interrupted there was real hardship in some places.

This led to the fear of civil disturbances in some towns, including Hyde in Cheshire, where the authorities were sufficiently concerned to swear in a number of special constables to keep the peace. This document (Ref HO 45/7523) comes from the treasure trove that is Home Office Registered Papers 1839-1979, series containing more than 26,000 boxes and files.

Fri Jun

2012

Martha’s marriages

Posted by Audrey Collins in Records and research

Petition for decree of nullity of marriage 1863

In 1861 a marriage took place between Henry Wells and Martha Cottam, both of ‘full age’ and after the calling of the banns on three successive Sundays. There was nothing to distinguish this wedding from countless others, but the story that unfolded afterwards was very unusual indeed. Sadly, the marriage was not a success, and in 1863 Mrs Wells petitioned for a divorce on the grounds of her husband’s adultery and cruelty. She alleged that he had not only committed adultery but had given her a venereal disease. He was also violent, having held a loaded gun to her head, and on another occasion hit her on the head with a lobster!

After she filed her petition, and her husband made a reluctant response, no further papers were added to the file. A petitioner might drop a case for all kinds of reasons, perhaps lack of funds, or some kind of out-of-court settlement. Neither was the case here. Instead, a completely new suit was filed a few weeks later, from William Henry Wells against ‘Martha Cottam, falsely called Martha Wells’. William Henry Wells was not her husband, he was her father-in-law, and the petition was not for a divorce, but for a decree of nullity. His contention was that his son, George Henry Wells, was aged only 18 at the time of the marriage, and therefore a minor, unable to marry without his father’s consent, so the marriage had not been valid in the first place. Furthermore, the banns had been called and the marriage performed using only the groom’s middle name, Henry, in a deliberate attempt to avoid detection by his father.

Sat Apr

2012

Titanic, 100 years on

Posted by James Cronan in Records and research

Today is the eve of the centenary of the sinking of Titanic. The ship struck the iceberg on 14 April at about 11.40 pm, but the anniversary of the sinking is on the 15^th, since it had not become fully submerged until 2.40 am.

RMS Titanic at Belfast 1 April 1912

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