Family History

cwhaley

cwhaley

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Location
Derbyshire
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United Kingdom
Started doing mine in 2012, met a number of people and travelled about in my quest to build the tree. Discovered a huge amount of information and quickly learnt how much detective work is involved in building a tree. Still doing it now and learning all the time. The British Newspaper Archive has been an invaluable resource.

Even found out by accident that my wife's Grandfather was the brother-in-law to my Great Great Uncle! No children.

Anybody else research theirs?
 
Yes
Got back to the 1600s in a few areas.
I was lucky. I inherited various "trees" from the 4x grandparents, who all had lots of siblings, so had a head start.
Put it all on ancestry.com and paid the subscription and it auto suggests from other family trees.
There's still lots of work to validate the matches, however, from there I was able to grow it to a mind numbing size.
Interesting to see some of their professions.

Answered some questions/exposed some secrets. Saw wartime correspondence, boat tickets for immigration (dates of birth, places of birth) and lots of photos of graves.
 
Yes the Ancestry 'hints' are useful in the main, especially as a starting point, but I'd come across a large number of suggestions which made logical sense but were actually incorrect. My Grandfather four generations back, born illegitimately in a workhouse and used to put his Grandmother down as his mother (as she looked after him) -- caused all sorts of issues!

Anything interesting come up your end? Mine were very wealthy around the 17th Century (my Grandfather many generations ago co-signing the death warrant for Charles I), but that money dissipated by the turn of the 18th Century and most followed the common local occupations of each era.
 
Yes, the "hints" caused a lot of headaches and dead ends. Also lots of similar names and places of birth.

I had a real mix of ancestors - ww2 fighter pilot, a member of the 11th hussars (although about a decade after the charge of the light brigade), a load of soldiers, priests and doctors, a bankruptcy and quick exit of the country, a chap who's legacy is building that is now a listed/historical thing, a pioneering plastic surgeon.

My immediate family moved to the south independently, we thought. Turns out some distant direct relatives lived really close, within a mile or so. Maybe the seed of "xxx is a lovely place" was set a few generations ago.

However the majority of the 600 odd people on there were just normal people leading short and hard lives.

The most emotive were scans of correspondence between husband and wife, somehow captured in a war archive.

And all I have of some people are a patchy scan of a birth and death register.

A life reduced to 2 photos
 
Been doing mine on and off for 20 year and back to 1695 in Norfolk, Cannot agree more about Ancestry hints though, years ago i sent a draft to a relative pointing out that not all leads have been researched and not to publish until i could confirm, yep you all know what happened he stuck it up on Ancestry,family search and various other sites and those same errors are still being promulgated today which has put me off passing info on unless i know that they are genuine researchers and not copy and paste genealogists.
My subs to Ancestry have expired but will renew in the new year.
 
ptarmigan said:
Been doing mine on and off for 20 year and back to 1695 in Norfolk, Cannot agree more about Ancestry hints though, years ago i sent a draft to a relative pointing out that not all leads have been researched and not to publish until i could confirm, yep you all know what happened he stuck it up on Ancestry,family search and various other sites and those same errors are still being promulgated today which has put me off passing info on unless i know that they are genuine researchers and not copy and paste genealogists.
My subs to Ancestry have expired but will renew in the new year.
Click to expand...

Pre-1600 gets tough owing to the poor management of records then. I think the earliest confirmed record I had was a marriage in 1588. From memory, it was the 1590s when it became law for parish records to be sent to registrars. Before then it's nearly all luck!

There seem to be armies of amateur researchers on there who take the hints as gospel. I used to comment on the public family trees put up on there, with corrections based on months of my own research to get to the truth. Some people responded positively, some ignored the comments and others took offence (!) so I stopped doing it and all of my research is on paper.

I generally prefer Find My Past.
 
I had a short go on Ancestry but looking at my parents family tree I was dead and buried about 20 years ago so never believed any entries after that.
 
ptarmigan said:
Do a check on freebmd and see what comes up eg registration district etc.
Click to expand...

That's a really useful site. It relies on volunteering though and they are only up to 1993 at the moment and that's only been partially transcribed. 1986 is the newest year they are at where 100% of BMDs are transcribed.
 
cwhaley said:
That sounds very odd! Was there a death entry for somebody with your name?
Click to expand...
I know the entry as for me as all other details were spot on re my late parents, sister and my DOB and marriage just I died about 20 odds years ago according to their careful research. I did contact my cousins in Oz who's public trees it was on but they never bothered to amend the entry so I just left them to play and believe what every errors they wanted.
 
fivearches said:
I know the entry as for me as all other details were spot on re my late parents, sister and my DOB and marriage just I died about 20 odds years ago according to their careful research. I did contact my cousins in Oz who's public trees it was on but they never bothered to amend the entry so I just left them to play and believe what every errors they wanted.
Click to expand...

Got to be a mistake/another person unless somebody has registered your death by mistake!

The thing is, all of those details will have separate records associated with them (your birth entry, marriage record, parents' birth entries, etc.) -- so there won't be one single record to confirm that was you. If their research was backed up with a source, I think somebody has just pulled a different death entry and incorrectly presumed it was you.
 
I was lucky, my family the Palmers, had a ship yard in Jarrow, the closing of which caused the Jarrow marches, loads of master marinas and even a bust of Sir Charles Mark Palmer in a museum in Jarrow where I can see the family resemblance.

However I started with a tree made in around 1930, by some great Uncle, and it seems he missed out any bits he didn't like, for example his children with his mistress.

But what was interesting was to see how the family behaved, what is now the grinkle park hotel was the family home, which was rebuilt when he put his foot through the floor when stamping his foot in a temper when playing pool.

And yes I have inherited his temper. Unfortunately not his money. But when the family were clearly not short of a penny or two, there was a report of one member claiming poor relief.

Engineering seems to have gone through the ages, some members being the engineers other the entretreneurs George designed the engines, Charles ran the business, and my branch also had connections to the Liverpool Blue funnel line, but when my father joined the Royal Navy and was asked if there was anyone in the family connected to the sea, he said no, as we were at that time unaware of the family history.

My father-in-law always said he was related to Adam Jones, and I think every family if you go back far enough you will find some one famous, maybe not the fame you want, but still famous, but often it is a case of realising what you have found, one of the families ships, "The Cove" it seems was used by the Royal Navy to rescue ships caught in the ice, I had the log book in my hand, but thought it was the wrong cove, as had not realised it had been lent to the Royal Navy, and entries did not make sense at the time as a result.
 
cwhaley said:
Started doing mine in 2012, met a number of people and travelled about in my quest to build the tree. Discovered a huge amount of information and quickly learnt how much detective work is involved in building a tree. Still doing it now and learning all the time. The British Newspaper Archive has been an invaluable resource.

Even found out by accident that my wife's Grandfather was the brother-in-law to my Great Great Uncle! No children.

Anybody else research theirs?
Click to expand...

Yep - All of my relis passed away long ago, and I had not taken much of an interest whilst they were alive, and all made more confused by everyone having to be called an 'aunt' or 'uncle' as a youngster. It all made for an interesting, but very confused mess of memories.

I got a lot of help to sort the mess out, from someone local, whose hobby was doing the research. He got my paternal back to 1800 and my maternal to 1850's, and it sorted out the 'aunts and uncles', from the true aunts and uncles. I remembered my father suggesting the family had originated from the Norfolk/Suffolk border, which I had taken with a pinch of salt, but the research confirmed it. Reading between the lines, the reason for the gradual family move, was employment on the railways. I've a photo of my g'uncle posing in front of his express locomotive from the 1920's. There were a few interesting ancestral mentions in the newspaper, one in regard to witnessing the murder of an ancestor's girlfriend, another where a night mail coach had been in collision with a hay cart driven by a drunk, which happened outside their door.

I was able to progress it further, rather tenuously back to the 1400's, via the Mormon site and, link to Nelson and that we had come over with the Norman invasion. I was not able to progress the maternal side, at all, only one extra generation.

One surprise, was who I had always thought to be an 'aunt', proved to be an actual aunt. The family had moved to Australia when I was quite young, and I had heard no more from them until just a few years ago. Their son had found me via the Mormon site research, contacted me and wanted to link his research to mine. He unfortunately passed away, before I could progress things.

I knew I had relatives move to Canada when I was young, but I wasn't able to trace them.

One thing I learned from it was - how large families had been and the high infant mortalities back then. Not such a problem now, with modern medical science - aren't we lucky to live now, rather than back then?
 
An aunt who is into research contacted me a few years ago saying that we may come ito some money from a relative, it transpired that a Gt aunt had moved to Canada about 1919 and did well for herself and husband, as yet i do not know if the husband died but she ended up in New York where she died after being naturlised and owned a fair bit of property but the snag was that relatives in the UK had claimed the estate despite not being the closest relatives.
My aunt took this up with the UK solicitors who handled the estate stating that they the solicitors had not used due diligence in research the family line,but,after going to the governing body for solicitors it was rejected so we lucked out.
Solicitors,doctors etc all close ranks to stop a sh%$£storm but i now make a point of checking all Bona Vacantia lists just in case.
 
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