I have a problem that might be verging on the point of becoming an addiction - I spend quite a lot of time learning about dead people! But not just any dead people - this lot are my ancestors, so I hope that gives me some kind of excuse. My head, my notebooks and two separate lever arch files are now full to bursting point with notes, census details, certificates for births, marriages and deaths, little plastic hole-punched pockets containing delicate original items like my grandma's birth certificate and things that can't be hole-punched like photographs of gravestones, I have trawled some churchyards so many times that I can now walk through at least two church gates and go straight to at least four different gravestones of interest, I've spent nights in some dreadful bed and breakfasts, some nice ones and even stayed in the same pub where a relative worked in 1851!
On reflection, I think I probably am addicted to researching the family tree but I would like to think that I have learnt one or two things along the way that somebody else can make use of. So this review is by no means going to be a comprehensive guide or a "one size fits all" approach because every family is bound to be different, but some of it might possibly help or give people on here ideas.
Is it Mary, is it Molly or is it Polly?
You would think that a first name would be something that wouldn't change over time, especially on official documents like the census (that national head count that they've been doing every ten years since 1841, although - as it happens - the 1931 census was apparently destroyed during World War Two and they didn't take one in 1941 because of the war) but it seems not. I printed out a copy of the 1881 census record to show my dad the details of a nine year old boy who I thought was likely to be my great-grandad, Dad looked down the list at the other children living at that address, spotted the two sisters Catherine and Susannah and said he remembered "Aunt Kate" and "Aunt Susan". In another instance, a child born in 1770 and christened Mary later popped up as a godparent to a niece or nephew as "Molly" and, after she married, her children seem to have been noted to be the offspring of either "John and Molly" or "John and Mary". So it's worth keeping an open mind about names - even parish clerks and vicars didn't always feel the need to use consistent spellings, so I have even found christenings where the baby's name has been recorded as, for instance, "Masco" with a note that the name could actually be "Myerscough". Sometimes I think it's easier to forget that I know how the name is spelt and try to think how I would spell the name if I had only heard it spoken out loud. I suspect that sometimes a name varies depending on the age of the person. A baby girl might be christened Elizabeth, named Lizzie as a little girl, turn up as a young married woman named Eliza and have become Bessie or Betty in her later years, but equally she might have simply been christened "Lizzie" rather than Elizabeth.
You can't actually get birth, marriage or death certificates for events in England and Wales if they took place before 1 July 1837 (or, at least, that was the date when events started to be recorded) although some christening records before this date will show a birth date as well as an address and possibly a father's occupation (these tend to be on Anglican ones, in my experience) or godparents (a detail that my notes on Catholic ancestors seem to provide). Slightly awkwardly, some Catholic records I have seen are filled out in Latin but with a bit of interpretation I have often been able to guess that "Helena" is their version of "Ellen" and that "Joannis", "Jacobus", "Josephus" and "Maria" are likely to actually be "John", "James", "Joseph" and "Mary". Surnames tend to remain intact even amongst the Latin, so they can be a useful clue. Burial records from the time before death certificates can also be quite revealing - not all of them give ages, but when they do it can help to identify whether the person you find matches the baptism records you found earlier and I have discovered that it can be worthwhile checking the burial records from the time starting immediately after a baby was baptised so that I can find out whether they survived to adulthood, a really handy strategy when I have noticed that (for instance) George and Ellen appear to have had a son called Joseph in one year and then another four years later. Sometimes there will even be an extra note on the record, possibly just a few words long (ie. "childbed", "measles", "accidentally drowned") where the parish clerk or priest has referred to the cause of a person's death.
Take family stories with a pinch of salt . . . or perhaps that should be a boulder?
My great grandmother was a lady and her husband was a Grenadier Guard outside Buckingham Palace . . . according to my late grandma! Well, not exactly - but I only found this out after attempting to trace my mum's family back to somewhere in Sussex, at which point an elderly relative said something to the effect of, "He wasn't a soldier, he was a gamekeeper!". Not much difference there, I'm sure you'll agree - and actually the soldier turned out to be no relation whatsoever, although he was virtually the same age as the boy who grew up to be a gamekeeper in Gainsborough. But in truth, this just proved a rule that I have come to realise a lot of genealogists swear by - "get documentation to back up everything"! This isn't to say that all family stories are complete rubbish - my dad is absolutely invaluable when we drive around the area where he grew up because he can remember which farms belonged to different friends or family members - but I always feel a sense of achievement when I actually spot a census record that shows a family living at the same address 100 years before living family members said they did. An unusual set of tools I have discovered for location hunting involves a combination of the Ordnance Survey map, a local A-Z and good old Google - OS maps and the A-Z usually name farms and houses of interest and I can get a good idea of whether or not a building is likely to be standing today just by searching for the address online.
Be prepared to find the unexpected . . .
Maybe I should subtitle this one, "be prepared to find out something you might not want to know". I can think of no better example to begin this one with than my great-great grandma and her dad - having established that great-great grandma was called Willday before she got married in 1890, I guessed that she would surely be with her parents and siblings in the 1881 census, wouldn't she? Not quite - she was certainly with her mother and her sisters in Walton on the Hill in Lancashire and her mother was stated to be married rather than widowed, so (assuming Mum hadn't lied and the father hadn't abandoned the family?) there should have been a Mr. Willday somewhere around. And I found him - Edward the accountant . . . in Walton Prison! Subsequent details from a distant relative let me in on the fact that, on census night, he was coming to the end of a six month prison sentence for stealing chickens and that, a few years earlier, he had been given a twelve month sentence for helping himself to what would now be £46,000 from a customer! Whoever said the Victorians were boring couldn't have looked into this side of life . . .
Get online!
You have probably gathered so far that there are a lot of family history resources to be found online, and these can be a bit of a mixed bag but all can be helpful if you use a bit of critical judgement. Generally speaking, if you want to get hold of census information (so you can see who was living in the same house as your ancestor) you'll probably have to take out an annual subscription with a site like Ancestry.com, Ancestry.co.uk or FindMyPast, although the 1881 census is actually free to search on FamilySearch.org because (from what I gather) the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or Mormons, took on the task of transcribing it and provide it to their visitors free of charge which has more or less forced all the other genealogy sites to do the same with the 1881 records in order to compete. (Incidentally, some critics of Genes Reunited say that Genes do not provide links to the 1881 census purely because they can't make money from it.) Prices for these subscription sites vary - I think Ancestry is currently about £85 a year and FindMyPast charges a little more - but different sites offer different things. For instance, although the 1911 census was not going to be made available until 2012 at one time due to the 100 year closure regulations, FindMyPast managed to negotiate some kind of deal that meant they got the exclusive rights to put the data online from 2009 onwards and consequently they are now able to offer a special premium rate subscription for either their usual package, the 1911 records alone or a third combination deal where you can get their normal package plus the 1911 records for £120 a year or so.
However, genealogy on the internet doesn't necessarily have to be expensive if you are lucky enough to find an online resource which is run on a voluntary basis (a few counties have Online Parish Clerk facilities where volunteers have transcribed parish records ie.
baptisms, marriages and burials which are provided totally free of charge). FamilySearch.org does have some parish records but generally in the case of a baptism, for instance, it might just say Ann Jones was baptised on 1 January 1800 at Preston, Lancashire to parents called John Jones and Mary whereas a specialised local interest resource might also reveal that the church was St. John's, that John Jones worked as a cotton spinner and that the family lived at Fishwick. As well as these organised sites, there are other collections of records that have been copied out and put online by one person who wanted their personal website to have a genealogical slant, or who began it as a kind of personal project. I was lucky enough, early in my research, to find a really comprehensive one for a place called Bottesford in Leicestershire which I came across purely because I typed "Bottesford" into a search engine alongside my great grandmother's maiden name and found myself on a site with 300 years worth of marriage records, 130 years of baptisms, 150 years of burials and even extra bits like photographs of the graves in the churchyard and other local items of interest.
The internet is not the be-all and end-all - welcome to the records office!
Sometimes I think that, to research your family tree, you need to give up either your time or your money and often both. I will be the first to say that the internet has helped me beyond measure with following up all my little branches and their resulting twiglets - since my 4xgreat-aunt Mary Maria managed to produce twelve children, and most of them lived to have families of similar sizes (and then there are their children's children . . . I'm sure you get the idea!) those two years of having an Ancestry.co.uk subscription was invaluable in tracing these endlessly expanding broods of children, but I have come to realise that if I had relied on the internet completely I would have missed out on so much "extra information". I love trying to find out lots of little details about my ancestors and I have probably only made use of a very small number of alternative options, but those that I have explored have thrown some really interesting puzzles at me.
This is why (and you may call me a hopeless case if you wish!) my idea of a good day out is to get in the car and take myself to Preston records office. Records offices are usually organised by county so I had to go to the Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland office in Wigston Magna to find out about some people on my mum's side (the things you do when your degree show is being marked and you're not allowed in the studio for a week . . . ), but because my dad's family were from the West Lancashire area, I have been able to spend huge amounts of information from the office that is less than twenty-five miles from home. In local and family history terms, a records office can be like an Aladdin's cave - there are parish records to look at, town directories (I have spotted a few distant relatives from Southport in one from the 1850s and even found a copied obituary notice for a direct ancestor), books about different towns and lots of original documents.
Generally speaking, you have to get a County Archives Research Network (or CARN) card to be able to look at these original documents but they are valid for about four years, don't cost anything and the records office will give you one if you can provide some proof of your identity and address - I took the paper and photocard parts of my driving licence and they were accepted. You can only use pencils in most offices so it is always worth taking a few along with a sharpener and some will only let you take loose sheets of paper whereas others will let notebooks in - I find it useful to keep my paper in a document wallet or one of those clear plastic A4 folders with a popper button. It's really easy to loose track of time in the office and I often find myself thinking, "Just five more minutes . . ." as I try to find one more bit of information at the same time as another bit of my brain is thinking, "I'm starving and M&S are only open for another twenty minutes!".
I have looked through quite a few original documents (ie. wills, tenancy agreements, property deeds and legal agreements) and they can be a little difficult to decipher thanks to the old writing. I used to think I was good at reading awkward writing until I came across this odd curly, almost Celtic kind of writing that somebody somewhere must have decided was appropriate for official legal paperwork and had to stare at it for ages before I realised that what looked like an "O" with a line through it was really a lower case "H". Not all of these are dull and boring - in fact some can give a real idea of the life a person lived. One will I found showed my ancestor itemising everything so meticulously that he was making bequests like "my six silver teaspoons to my daughter Elizabeth and my silver sugar bowl and milk jug to my daughter Ellen" and in another case, I found a rather touching reference to an obviously elderly man describing himself as "of sound mind but a little out of health" before he went on to leave hi son in law a single shilling (apparently this was a snub - a way of saying, "I haven't forgotten you, I just don't want to leave you anything valuable"!) and all his clothes to his eldest son!
A well written gravestone can be a wonderful thing
If you get really addicted to researching your tree, you might find yourself doing something else I occasionally do and start walking round graveyards where you think your ancestors might live. In the case of big municipal cemeteries with thousands of graves, it may be worth phoning up to see if they can tell you whether your ancestor appears in their burial records (obviously having a name and an approximate date of death will help the person you're contacting) but be aware that some cemetery offices will charge for searching the records - I think Leicester is one - whereas others do not. We managed to track down the grave of my grandad and his parents, and also another grave for his grandparents, in one cemetery and the person on the phone very kindly talked us through which direction to go in to find one of them and sent e-mail directions for the other, completely free of charge.
The gravestone for my great-great grandparents on this branch turned out to be on a large double plot which held the remains of three generations of the family because great-great grandad had been the cemetery keeper for over thirty years and chose a good site for his family grave!
Other stones that I've come across have been intriguing for other reasons - I located one purely by chance because I knew one family group had been Catholic and that there was a Catholic church in the village where they had lived, and quite unexpectedly came face to face with my ancestor's headstone, which told me two things - firstly that her husband didn't seem to have been buried there (he seems to have moved away to live with one of his married daughters after his wife died) and secondly that their daughter Elizabeth, who I hadn't been able to track down, was there - in her married name! So I probably learnt four or five bits of information just from one stone.
A couple of years ago I also started a personal project to copy out all the names, dates and ages on every gravestone that I could read in our parish church - being a bit clueless about web design, I had previously started a "fill in the words and pictures" type of ready built free website so that I could get my data onto the internet (largely because nobody else seemed to be researching either of my direct lines back from my parents so I thought maybe I should do it!) and so I created another section to include my local graveyard dates and names in case it could help anybody else out. Admittedly, I have neglected it a bit lately - partly because of the cold weather earlier this year, which makes walking round a churchyard finding things out more like torture than a pleasure! - but occasionally I will get an e-mail from somebody who has found a relative on one of my lists, which makes it all worthwhile and now I have probably got several hundred different names from different churchyards on my pages.
Unfortunately, not all burial records match up with what you find in a churchyard. Some gravestones can be there even though there is no entry in the register, and some people noted down as being buried in a certain place don't seem to have had a gravestone at all - perhaps because they couldn't afford one or the family didn't choose to put a memorial up at the time, or even because (over time) the stone has become weathered and chipped or even so unstable that modern church officials or health and safety people have decided that it has to be taken down before it falls on somebody. Occasionally, though (this is the case in the parish church in my town, as well as in Aughton and Ormskirk in Lancashire) some will be taken down and laid flat to form the path around the church, so that at least the inscription can still be seen if people stop to read it.
The Victorians didn't have sex before marriage . . . did they?
Judging by the way newspapers shake their heads at teenage pregnancy these days and the repressed image that the Victorians don't seem to have shaken off after all this time, I can understand why people might think that people from the past wouldn't have done such things.
Either my family have been a bit more . . . adventurous than usual, shall I say? . . . or nothing has changed since time began, but I have uncovered quite a few surprises along the way when I've been researching. A good way to tell whether a baby might have been illegitimate is to look at the birth certificate (if it was registered) for post-1837 arrivals or at the baptism records. A birth certificate for an illegitimate baby will usually have a blank space in the box where the father's details should be, but baptism records can vary. Occasionally it might say, "Ann Jones, daughter of Ellen Jones" which implies that the mother wasn't married. Alternatively, the mother might be described as "Ellen Jones, Spinster" or the record might be more explicit and state "base born daughter", "illegitimate daughter" or even "natural daughter" - this last term crops up in Jane Austen's novel Emma so I think it might be a polite way of describing an unmarried mother. I have been very lucky with one relative who had three children before marriage because the priest actually named the father - or, presumably, the man he believed (or the mother named) as the father. I have heard it said that, to avoid having to pay for the child's upkeep out of parish funds, some local officials would question the mother before or even during the birth - which seems quite cruel to me - in the hope that she would name the father so that the parish could make the father pay maintenance money to save their own cash!
A more subtle way of identifying a father's surname (although it's not foolproof) is to look for a christening where a baby called something like John Smith Jones is born to a mother called Ann Jones. It's not concrete evidence, but there is just a chance that John's father could have been a Mr. Smith! My own great-great grandmother, who gave birth at seventeen and married at nearly eighteen did this - luckily for her, it seems she got to marry her baby's father.
Photographs and scribbles . . .
Photographs haven't solved all of my mysteries - in fact they have thrown up quite a lot of the "well, she looks like that woman, but she's not old enough to be that other woman's mother, so is she a sister or an aunty?" type of unanswered questions, but they can be quite intriguing. I had grandmothers from either ends of the hoarding spectrum - one of them threw everything out and the other kept absolutely everything, so I have been left with a great collection of Victorian formal photographs of varying sizes and albums dating from the early 1930s, as well as the parish magazine from 1915 that listed my gran's christening date. A lot of the photos aren't annotated, but some are - in one case the back is dated and signed by someone who seems to have been a professional photographer, which just shows that even a farmer must have had some reason to be able to afford having his photo taken! The costume enthusiast in me is amazed to see what people were wearing - even my great aunty, a farmer's daughter, seems to have been able to follow the bobbed hair and shorter skirt fashion of the late 1920s - but there is yet another item in our house which has shown me that even old prayer books can be more interesting than they first appear.
Somebody has written the name of my great-great grandmother in the front (I suppose it must have been her) and dated it 1869, which I didn't think was particularly relevant until I happened to look in the back and find that her married name was scribbled down with a date that was four months before the wedding - I am still wondering whether she had decided to marry great-great grandad and was practising her new name, or whether she was still thinking about whether to accept him!
People aren't perfect!
I mentioned at the start that my grandma made her in-laws sound far more glamorous than they really were (although, as it turns out, my great-grandmother did work for a woman who had married into the Duke of Wellington's family - The Peerage website is good if you want to find out about the aristocracy), but family history is all about human beings and they don't get everything right all the time. Ages can be manipulated - my great-grandfather was eight months old when the 1861 census was taken, he later went on to marry a girl who was eight years younger than himself and by 1901 his age had been quietly modified to thirty-seven. He had actually been born illegitimately, so when he got married he put his stepfather's name down in the "father's name" box - whether because he saw his stepfather as his own father or whether he thought it wouldn't look respectable to leave the box empty is something I will never know.
The point about respectability is another issue that might make searching for some relatives quite difficult - if an unmarried daughter gave birth and the baby's grandmother was still young enough to be able to claim that she had fallen unexpectedly pregnant or mistaken it for the menopause, she might just do that to save her daughter's reputation and if the whole family remembered to present their version of the facts on marriage certificates and census records, it might be very difficult or impossible to prove otherwise. Alternatively, this young child who simply appears from nowhere in the family might even be the offspring of a friend or relative that the family you have found has agreed to raise as their own for some reason. I have got one such questionable child in my tree whose birthplace changes on every census record, whose birth doesn't appear to have been registered and whose christening in that name just won't appear for me - I have no idea who she belongs to!I said that this probably wasn't going to be a comprehensive guide and I'm sure that it isn't, but hopefully some of this will prove to be interesting or even give somebody some ideas about where to look when they can't think how else to find that ancestor who just won't be found. If all else fails, try my art teacher's suggestion and "think outside the box" - the brother of that chicken stealer in my tree turned out to have emigrated to another country entirely, and I thought I just wasn't looking hard enough . . .
Shoemakers, chicken stealers, farmhands and gamekeepers? 
