Week 41 - Sports - 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks

Week 41 is all about sports, and I find sporting records for my ancestors can be a bit light on the ground, although I do have some memorable finds.

While cleaning out my parent's home after my mother passed away, I found many treasures, several of which I have already documented in this blog.  One such treasure, hidden at the back of a cupboard, was a certificate won by my father for coming second in a relay race when he was at school.  He obviously valued it, because he had kept it all these years, but neither I nor my sister had ever seen it before.

My father's school relay certificate

Other sporting achievements were reported in local newspapers, just waiting for me to find them.  Two such articles concerned by Great Great Grandfather Walter Green, who clearly had the time and wealth for sporting pursuits such as deer hunting and pigeon shooting.

Chelmsford Chronicle, 26 February 1892

From the article above, I find that Walter not only enjoyed deer hunting but kept his own pack of hunting hounds, something that would have necessitated considerable expense.  Clearly he found it worthwhile to have his own hunting hounds, and would have kept horses and ridden well also.

Essex Standard, 21 June 1884

The detail included in these newspaper articles paints quite a vivid picture of Walter's sporting passtimes, although it is a little disappointing to note he lost the above pigeon shooting contest.  Oh well, you can't win them all!

Week 40 - Ten - 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks

Week 40's prompt is 10 - and the first response that springs to mind is that my father was one of ten siblings.  As Dad was the second youngest of the siblings and in his 40s when he had children, all my cousins are quite a bit older then I am - some even have children who are my senior.  Family gatherings can be a bit of a generation game, and I certainly missed out on growing up with a groups of cousins my own age.

Given the range of ages amongst the 10 Green siblings, the oldest were leaving home while the youngest were still toddlers, so there are few photos of all 10 siblings together.  I only have one picture of them all, taken when they were adults at their mother's funeral in 1965.

10 Green siblings with their father

From other family gathering I have several of the Green siblings together, but this is the only one I have of all of them at once, which makes it quite special. 

Week 39 - On the Farm - 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks

Week 39 is 'On the Farm', and as so many of my ancestors were farmers and agricultural labourers I have a fair bit to choose from.

I was born on a farm - sorry Dad - on a sheep station.  As I was less than 3 years old when we left I have few clear memories of our home there, but have heard stories all me life about it.  The few photos I have of the old homestead are very precious to me, and I always enjoyed hearing stories about my parents lives there.

My father Peter at Para Station, c1960s

Dad's parents were born and married in England before emigrating to Australia, and over the years I have acquired several photos of the property where Grandad was born in the small village of Fordham, Essex.  The Green family had lived there for several generations, and the farm is now held by the Woodland Trust.

Manor Farm, Fordham, Essex, England

Week 38 - Unusual Source - 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks

The prompt for Week 38 (where has the year GONE??) is Unusual Source, and it sent me back through my records looking for odd bits and pieces I have picked up over the years.

I have plenty of records from the usual sources.  Birth/Baptism, Marriage and Death/Burial records from civil registrations and church records, censuses and electoral rolls, newspaper articles, directories, wills, military files - the list goes on.  For this post I need things slightly more exotic.

Amongst the more individual documents I have found are things like prison records, asylum records, apprenticeship papers and work references.  These types of documents I only have a few of, and many have required more effort to trace and obtain.

One unique record in my files is the workhouse admission register for one of my several-times-great uncles, Henry Argent.  Henry was a carpenter by trade and was admitted to the workhouse on Saturday 13th May 1876.  He was 70 years of age and suffering from bronchitis, and he died barely 2 weeks later.

1876 Workhouse Admission for Henry Argent

World War 1 Soldier's Pension Records

Ancestry.com has recently undertaken a major new project to digitize First World War soldiers' pension records, and stage one of the project has now gone live.  This initial set comprises 50,485 records from naval pension ledgers and Merchant Marine cards.  Ancestry has added searchable transcriptions of the records, with 18,270 digital images of the originals available to subscribers of Ancestry's partner website Fold3.  The record release was made possible by Ancestry's partnership with the Western Front Association (WFA).

This first tranche of records consists of cards used by the Ministry of Pensions to monitor payments to injured merchant navy veterans or the families of the dead. The naval ledgers, meanwhile, list married men in the Royal Navy who were lost at sea, and whose widows and children were eligible for pensions.  Both sets of records can include the seaman's name, rank, service number, date of birth, date of death or injury and the ship he served on.  They also list each widow's name, date of marriage, and the names and dates of birth of any children.

In November 2012, the WFA acquired an archive of approximately 6.5 million First World War pension records index cards and ledgers from the Ministry of Defence.  In December 2017, it announced that scanning and indexing of the records was underway, following a deal with Ancestry. 

These records kept track of pensions paid to soldiers, sailors and airmen injured in the First World War and also recorded payments to the widows and dependents of men who were killed.  They are one of the largest surviving sets of records of British forces in the First World War, since many records and individual dossiers were destroyed in air raids in 1940.

Ancestry plans to upload more records before Remembrance Day on 11 November and to complete the set by early 2019.  WFA is also planning to allow its members to access the records via its website without an Ancestry or Fold3 subscription.

New Records on FamilySearch

It has been a big month for the people at FamilySearch.  They have expanded their free online archives during September with almost 13 million new indexed family history records and over 500,000 digital images from around the world. New historical records were added from Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Colombia, England, France, Italy, Lesotho, Liberia, Mexico, Netherlands, Peru, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Wales, and the United States, and new digital images were added from BillionGraves.

New resources from Australia include the South Australian immigrant ship papers 1849-1940 (133,542 records added), the South Australian school admission registers 1873-1985 (44,673 records added), and the Victorian inward passenger lists 1839-1923 (1,618,183 records added).

Another significant addition is the England and Wales national index of wills and administrations 1858-1957 (1,024,884 records added).

If you want a more comprehensive list of the records added, check out their blog post https://www.familysearch.org/blog/en/records-familysearch-september-2018/ and see what is relevant to your own research.

Well done to the people at FamilySearch for all their work!

Week 37 - Closest to your Birthday - 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks

As the number of names and dates in our family research grows, it is inevitable that some dates will coincide, that some significant events in our family's history will fall close to, or right on, our birthdays.  In my own family, both my parents and sister were born at the start of the year, in the Australian summer.  I'm off in August, in the depths of our winter.  Several cousins, however, have birthdays quite close to mine.  As both parents come from fairly large families I have over 30 cousins, so it is inevitable some dates are fairly close.

As I have delved into the family history finding coinciding dates has always interested me - although on one occasion it did lead me astray and gave me a valuable lesson in making assumptions and how easy it is to get it wrong.

A few years ago I discovered a family with three children all baptised on the same day, and jumped rather enthusiastically to the conclusion 'Triplets!!"  I'm sure many can immediately see my mistake here.  Closer examination showed that while it was in fact three siblings all baptised on the same day, one was three months old, the second was two years old and the third almost 5 years old.  I will never again make the mistake that a christening or baptism closely equates with birth!  Looking back I now know that several ancestors were baptised as children several years old rather than as babies - it was more common than I had realised.

Going back over the generations, several ancestors have birthdays on the same day as mine.  Others married, or died, on the same day as I was born, but sharing a birthday with a several times great grandparent is always going to be special.  Sharing a birthday or other significant date with our ancestors cam help us to connect with them - to feel a greater sense of being family and a more 'personal' connection to that particular individual.