Monday, June 28, 2021

Who Do You Think You Are Magazine

The latest issue of Who Do You Think You Are magazine is now available free online for Campaspe Library members via our subscription to Libby eMagazines.

Inside this month’s issue

  • Parish registers online
    Discover your ancestors’ baptisms, marriages and burials with our updated region-by-region guide to UK parish registers
  • Canadian war brides
    John D Reid uncovers the stories of the British women who travelled to Canada after the Second World War
  • Boxing and wrestling
    Sarah Elizabeth Cox grapples with the legendary fighters of Victorian London
  • Reader story
    Kyle Ring on tracing his family tree from Trinidad to the Domesday Book
  • Best websites
    Discover ancestors who worked as fishermen and whalers
  • Plus…
    Finding your ancestors’ hospital records, the lives of felt hatters, how to use WikiTree and much more…

Around Britain

  • Dumfries and Galloway
    Our guide to family history from south-west Scotland

Wednesday, June 23, 2021

Scottish Indexes Conference

 


The next Scottish Indexes online conference will be held on 10 July 2021 via Zoom and Facebook, as a sixteen-hour event to incorporate global time differences.

The conference is hosted by genealogists Graham and Emma Maxwell.  In order to make their conferences time-zone friendly they start at 7 am UK time and keep going until 11 pm UK time.. Each presentation is shown twice, once between 7 am and 3 pm, then again between 3 pm and 11 pm. You can come and go throughout the day. This years' conference includes:

  •  ‘Merchant and Trades House Records’ by Dr. Irene O’Brien
  •  ‘Tracing Scottish Women’ by Kirsty Wilkinson
  •  ‘Tracing Scottish Ancestors Before 1855’ by Alison Spring
  • ‘Overcoming Brickwalls: Case Studies’ by Emma Maxwell

The event also includes a Q&A session where attendees can pose questions to the panel of experts.

Registration is free on Zoom and Facebook. Follow the directions at Scottish Indexes.

Monday, June 21, 2021

Unlike Your Ancestors

Unlike your ancestors, you will probably never have to:

1. Make all of your own clothes
Although craft and fabric stores still offer a wide variety of cloth, patterns, and thread for the purpose of creating clothing, and homemade is making a bit of a resurgence, for most people sewing is just a hobby to supplement a store-bought wardrobe.  In the past, though, every garment had to be hand-sewn, at least until the sewing machine and some mass-produced clothing was introduced in the mid-1800s. In fact, many families would have sewn all of their own clothes well into the 20th century. Of course, those with money often employed others to do the work for them – but the task of ordering fabrics, choosing designs and undertaking measurements would have still been much more time-consuming.

2. Travel by ocean liner, steamboat, or horse-and-buggy
If you get frustrated with the length of your daily commute, imagine how your great-great grandmother felt when it came time to travel from her farm into town in a horse-drawn wagon or by foot, or spend days or weeks on dangerous roads and boats to visit family, or move to a new place.  Before the spread of airliners in the 1950s the only way across the ocean was spending weeks on a ship, and travel was costly as well as time consuming.

3. Correspond with those you love entirely by mail
Years ago the only way to connect with loved ones was through a hand written letter that could easily take weeks - or months if travelling overseas - to arrive at its destination. That was the reality for your ancestors.

4. Read about your postal tardiness in the newspaper
Home mail delivery has had a relatively short life. Years ago, mail was sent from post office to post office, and only delivered elsewhere for an extra fee. That’s why you’ll sometimes see notices in 1800s-era newspapers warning a list of local folks to pick up their mail soon or risk it being sent to a “dead letters” department.

5. Sit for a formal portrait
Genealogists cherish the brittle old tintypes and cabinet cards of our ancestors, with their rigidly posed and unsmiling subjects. It won’t be long, though, before our descendants equally cherish our own (often-awkward) family portraits, because sitting for a formal family photo has largely become a thing of the past. Why herd the entire crew to a stuffy studio when you can just use a selfie stick to capture a digital image? Unless you’re printing and framing (or at least digitally preserving) these treasures for future generations, the classic family portrait may cease to exist.

6. Wear a corset
Remember that scene in Gone With the Wind when Scarlett holds on for dear life to her bedpost as Mammy forcefully tugs the strings of her corset until Scarlett achieves her famous 17-inch waist? Corsets were a common component of women’s fashion for more than 500 years–until the early 1900s, when medical professionals finally put an end to the painful practice by announcing the health risks of shifting internal organs and restricting breathing.

7. Use an Icebox
Before we had the fridge ice was harvested from colder areas and shipped for storage in specially constructed ice houses. Homeowners could pick up or request delivery of ice blocks to their homes, where the blocks were kept in wooden or metal boxes lined with straw or sawdust. In fact, ice boxes were common into the 1930s and beyond. It was the only way to keep food cold and prevent it spoiling.

8. Let blood
Bloodletting (thankfully) went out of fashion in the 1800s, but prior to that, a bad headache or practically any other ailment may have led to your physician cutting into a vein and letting a few pints of blood drain out to cure your ills. Today’s researchers believe that excessive bloodletting led to the deaths of King Charles II in 1685 and U.S. President George Washington in 1799.

9. Die from TB, smallpox, measles, yellow fever or cholera
Thanks to improved sanitation and health care many diseases that shortened the life spans of our ancestors have been eradicated. Today the average worldwide life expectancy stands at a robust 72 years, compared to the 30- to 40-year expectation of our 18th and 19th century predecessors.

10. Wait days or weeks to hear the latest news
These days, instant notifications and “breaking news” banners on our various screens alert us to what’s happening in the next town or across the globe within minutes. But before radios and televisions, news traveled through word-of-mouth, mail, and newspapers–at a significant delay for those in rural communities. Imagine not knowing about the death of a family member, the election of a president, or a declaration of war for weeks. 

11. Use an outhouse at home
Portable public toilets may come close, but they’re not constructed of splintery wood, filled with spiders and situated in our backyards. And while we often associate outhouses with fun camping trips and iconic homesteads, the reality of sewage disposal before modern plumbing was anything but pleasant. Chamber pots  are also thankfully no longer a necessity.

12. Manage a funeral and burial
As if the grief of losing a loved one wasn’t enough, our ancestors were once tasked with preparing bodies for viewing (usually in a home’s living area or parlour) and digging and closing the grave in the family or town cemetery.

13. Employ child labor
As children, our ancestors were often awoken at daybreak to work on the family farm, help with daily chores, and perhaps even report for duty at a factory or a mine. Many families relied on the extra income a child might be able to earn or the extra labor they could provide to a cottage industry or farm.  Older children might also be expected to stay at home to look after younger siblings while their mother went out to work.

14. Have dental work without pain relief
Imagine having a tooth extracted with no pain relief. Modern dental care was unknown to our ancestors, and the only remedy for badly decayed teeth was extraction, often with little provision for numbing the pain.

15. Travel away from family and friends forever
While many of us today will travel far from home to make a new life, we have the ability, in most cases, of visiting home and family again quite easily. But for many of our ancestors, a big move meant saying goodbye to family forever. It was a steep price to pay for a chance at a better future, but many did it. 

Friday, June 18, 2021

In the Census

How accurate are the census records? I'm sure this question has arisen for every genealogist at some point in their research.  We quickly learn that census records cannot be considered the absolute and final authority. 

Why does someone's age change every census by less (or more!) than the 10 years between censuses? Why is a surname being spelled differently on three different censuses? Why does an ancestor have a different first name in the 1861 census (is it even the right person?)?  And why does the census give a different place of birth for great grandma each time?

Consider first what question was actually asked by the census taker. For example with ages - did he ask about how old the person was, or how old they were on their last birthday or.....  Were the ages of all the adults in an area rounded up (or down) to the closest multiple of five (yes, it happened)?

People lied about their ages, or sometimes simply got it wrong. My grandmother always insisted she was born on 30 June 1906.  According to her birth registration, however, she was born on 30 June 1905.

Remember spelling was not exact back in the 1800s and earlier. A census taker wrote what he heard, and whether or not he was a good speller or was familiar with the surname dictated what we see recorded on the census page. You get what I will grumpily refer to as 'some semi-literate clerk's best guess".  Keep in mind that it was not your ancestor who filled in the census themselves.

Different first names? Children were usually given at least two names at birth and an individual might choose to be known by their middle name, or perhaps a nickname. My ancestor Elizabeth Green (nee May) was always known as Betsy - and that is the name recorded in several censuses.

The next question we need to ask ourselves is - who provided the answers on that census? Was it a parent? Mothers may have had a better idea of their children's birth years and ages than the father. Was it an older child (perhaps the parents were not home), a grandparent or even a neighbour giving the information? Tracing a family through several censuses may have seen a different respondent each time.  All these factors will affect the quality of the census information.

As with many other genealogical records, the census records can contain inaccurate information, mistakes and even outright lies

Wednesday, June 16, 2021

Family Tree UK Magazine

The July edition of Family Tree UK magazine is now available free online for Campaspe Library members via our subscription to Libby eMagazines.

Inside this month's issue : 

  • Seven decades of change on the Olympic Way • The completion of new Olympic Steps at the SSE Arena, Wembley, has inspired the release of archive photos showing the area at the time of the 1948 Olympic Games
  • Ride this way for Cycling News • British Newspaper Archive has this month added Cycling magazine to its archive, with 80,954 pages to explore, covering the years 1891 to 1914
  • New Welsh collections at Ancestry • Ancestry has announced the release of two new collections, which between them span the years 1845 to 1920
  • Try coastal time-tripping • A new and unique way to travel across Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, when it is safe to do so, has just been launched, allowing travellers to plan modern-day adventures whilst exploring what life was like for communities of the past
  • Revealed: names at risk of becoming extinct • New research has revealed the names at risk of extinction in the UK and those that are growing fastest in popularity, analysing over 1.5million names across a period of ten years
  • FindMyPast share 1921 project update • FindMyPast has shared an update on the progress of their project to digitise and publish the 1921 census of England & Wales
  • 4M new images for Australia added to FamilySearch • Four million new digital images from Australia, Victoria Wills, Probate and Administration Files 1841-1926, have been added to the FamilySearch genealogy website
  • British Library and FindMyPast announce renewal of long-term partnership • FindMyPast and the British Library have announced an extension of their long term partnership; the British Newspaper Archive, along with news that millions more newspaper pages will be digitised over the coming years
  • 1.5M RAF Operations Record Books for the Dambusters squadron go online at TheGenealogist • TheGenealogist has released a large tranche of searchable RAF Operations Record Books (ORBs) including those ORBs for the famous No 617 Squadron, giving an insight into their wartime work
  • The Victorian & Edwardian Seaside • This summer, many of us will be heading to the coast for holidays nearer home – just like the Victorians and Edwardians. Anna Maria Barry takes a trip back in time and explores the seaside excursions of the 1800s
  • Life in Limerick • This month, Gill Shaw tracks down her 3x great-grandfather to Limerick, where she finds him and his young wife starting a family, with several baptisms about to be recorded at an Italian-looking church…
  • Escapes from World War I prisoner of war Camps in Britain 1914-1920 • Colin R Chapman takes a look at successful escapes from World War I POW camps, dispelling the myth that only one such escape was successful
  • North Liverpool Academy Family History Club • Despite being in existence for less than a year, the North Liverpool Academy family history club has seen its members make discoveries that many long-standing family historians would wish were on their family trees The club was established as a summer school in 2020 by genealogist and member of staff at the Academy, Ian Mooney. Overcoming the challenges of Covid lockdowns, a considerable number of students...

Tuesday, June 15, 2021

What's New on FamilySearch

FamilySearch have been busy over the past months adding records to their free online database.  Below are lists of the new additions for the United Kingdom and for Australia.

New additions for the United Kingdom include : 



New additions for Australia include :



Thursday, June 10, 2021

What's New on Ancestry?

It is always worthwhile checking to see what new records have been added to the database at Ancestry, as well as which record categories have been updated to include new information.  This may mean there is new data waiting for me to find, so I like to check back every few months at least.  Below are some of the recent additions for the United Kingdom and Australia.

New records for the United Kingdom include : 


New records for Australia include : 






Monday, June 7, 2021

Trees that go Out on a Limb

Over my years as a Family History researcher, I have been constantly amazed by some of the errors and misinformation I've found in online family trees.  So many people make assumptions, ignore the basics of biology and put their (clearly incorrect) family trees online for others to copy - and the copiers accept their incorrect data without questioning errors which should be clear at a glance.

So without mentioning names or pointing fingers, here are some of the more eye-popping errors I have come across that really should leap out at researchers.
    • Children cannot be born before their parents.
    • Children also cannot be born to a mother who is 8 years old.  Or 94 years old. 
    • Children are highly unlikely to be born to a father who is 89 years old (while this MAY be biologically possible, it is unlikely and deserves a bit of fact checking).
    • A child cannot be christened 7 months before they are born.
    • Full siblings cannot be born 4 months apart.  While medical technology may be making this possible today, it really wasn't possible in the 1840s.
    • A woman cannot marry 3 years after she has died.
    • A man cannot enlist in the army 5 years after he has died.
    • No one can die in the decade before they are born.
    • A man cannot be buried 17 days before he dies.
    • In 1883 a child could not be born in England and christened in Australia 5 days later. 
    • Yes, people do move around.  But they will not usually have three children born on three different continents in the space of three years.
    I can hear people out there laughing out there at some of these errors, but remember I've seen each of them included in someone's online family tree.  And believe me, getting these errors corrected can be next to impossible.

    So the next time you are looking at an online tree that intersects with your family, remember to treat it with a degree of caution.  Not everyone is a meticulous researcher, and sometimes a simple typing error will lead to confusion.  Treat online family trees as hints at best, and always look for corroborating evidence, the sources a person has cited, anything to confirm names, dates, places and details.  Don't follow others out onto a shaky limb.