Searching for burials - summary of the UK websites' offerings

Gravestone records are becoming a bit of a minefield out there.

Deceasedonline is the only UK-centred site, and probably the most determined to sign up local authorities and to make money.  They look strong for Wiltshire, Wakefield, Bolton, Cheshire West, London Boroughs.  I should mention it gives only burial registers, not gravestone transcriptions.

Billiongraves are good in some very specific parts of the UK: Sandbach, Nuneaton, Kensal Green, Beaconsfield, Leigh, Hindley, Lowton (these in Greater Manchester area), Stockport, Bangor, Conwy Valley, Llandudno

Findagrave.com is ubiquitous for the US, and its results now pop up in Ancestry searches.  However, I've never found any UK entries - it claims to have 27000 records, though this might be cemeteries.  I gave up trying.  Possibly the dropdown county box for England works in other browsers (not Chrome).

Gravestonephotos has Devon, Durham, Suffolk, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Surrey and North Yorkshire.  It will shortly release Wymondham Abbey gravestones, which I'm excited about.

Interment.net is very patchy and doesn't appear to have had any new content for awhile: it is strong in Durham and Bedworth (Warwickshire) with some 'select' graves listed for Burnley, Colne and some parts of Greater Manchester.  It also has reasonable Cleveland coverage.

Findmypast may have some monumental inscriptions (the same thing as gravestone transcriptions) but the results are mingled up with the burial registers, so it's hard to find what you're looking for

Other useful sites:
Australia Cemetery Index - made a good breakthrough on here, seems strong for NSW
Ontario cemetery project - have never found anyone on this
South Africa - truly useful

Tidal wave

Whoomph - the wave comes in and smashes into the defences.  Soak!  The deluge from Cornwall hits us on the chin and we stagger back.  Bash!  Another wave comes in from Wales.

This has been the last week of news from the Western portions of my tree.  Cousin Ray wrote in with surprising news - that distant uncle David Francis (1805) who was known to have gone to New York with his family from Wales, had sired a child by his second marriage aged around 70.  It took him about a moment to find that line, kinda thriving, in San Diego, California.  This is somewhat poignant for us - as months earlier Ray had found the last of the original line (from first marriage) dying with no known relatives in that exact same neighbourhood.

When Thomas Hitchens married Miss Thomas at St Blazey in 1838 we could see his sister was witnessing the marriage under her married name.  Three more sisters appeared out of the rubble, marrying at Blazey or in Tywardreath.  The last time we'd seen this family was in 1820 at Gwennap.  One of the sisters left a will, in 1879, naming a bunch of relatives and identifying for certain sure, that Sarah Hitchens wife of Martin Verran was Thomas's sister.  The whole lot are now the family, reunited, of my Sarah Hunter of Redruth (1782) by her first marriage to miner Hitchens.  It was only by sitting down and looking at this tree, that I got it sorted.  Somewhat embarrassing that it took me 15 years to get around to it.  So far we've only found family from the Verrans, in Shiraz- and olive- growing Clare, South Australia.

I've been lucky enough to hear from the Verran's great-great-grandson John Symonds in New South Wales, now 90, with one or two stories and photographs to help bridge that gap since 1820.

Then came a surprise email out of the blue from Henry Hunter, of the Goldrush towns out in British Columbia.  He left Cornwall age 12 in 1837 and for a while we thought he might be a missing sibling who would just slot right in to the tree.  Not to mention explaining the rumour of the uncle who disappeared and never said where he'd been.  But it's now thought he's the son of Henry senior a mariner from Mylor, near Falmouth, which would have given him plenty more opportunity to jump on a ship.

These Western districts of the UK sure have the capacity to surprise, and laugh at our supposed grip of events from the 1800s era.

Additional surprises came in the form of William Rapson Oates's life story (from a researcher who I spotted on my website) and in contact from the family of the centenarian on my Pearce side, Elizabeth Moss Bray.  (And on the same branch, Arthur Gordon Bartlett's wife finally becoming known - grew up, possibly on Robben Island and daughter settled in Zimbabwe.)  And how could I forget - finding my missing John Rodda, not in Africa or America, but in a pub on the Acton road.

Ann, 18, not in South Africa (1858)

Excuse me google, have you seen my relative.  She's about 18, she used to live in England, and I think she went to live in South Africa?  It's just gone 1861 and I haven't seen her anywhere in the census so I think she must have left home.  Can you help me?

Google couldn't help me.  But FamilySearch did.

The story starts with William Frampton Cotty who disappears with his wife and children somewhere between 1851 - when he's at South Street, South Petherton, Somerset - and 1861, when he's not in the country at all.  No website had any records on him, but by googling I found references to the family in South Africa, and by checking their National Archives 'NAAIRS' catalogue, I slightly bulked out what I knew on him and his boys.  The youngest girl by a fluke marries in Bristol, has a baby in Lancashire and returns to South Africa (odd).   But of the oldest girl Ann, there was nothing.

A new site, South African Settlers, popped up in my internet browser with extra info on W. F. Cotty.  His entry had been indexed from the Cape Death Notices and was modestly informative.  By this time, I already knew or had surmised that his cousin the housekeeper had become his partner and later his wife, but I didn't know this:

That Ann had a middle name of Martha.  In 1851 she's down as Ann M, but her birth shows her as Anne.  I'd even signed up to the Crewkerne Yahoo Groups which has since deluged my mailbox in the hopes of getting the baptism at Hinton St George and finding that possibly useful middle name.

A few days after finding this, having fruitlessly combed South Africa for Annie Marthas who had children in the 1860s, I thought of putting her name into FamilySearch.  It's worked before.  I now have a claim to the firstborn male of Mount Vernon, NY, as a relative because I put a married couple's name into FamilySearch.

So off do I try it again.  And, no!   Can this be?

Not expecting to find anything, I pick up Ann as mother of a girl born around 1865 in Springfield Illinois.  Well for a girl born 1840, that's about right.  It's more than about right, it's spot on - Ann's aunt and uncle lived in Springfield, and of all the places in the US, this is one it makes all the sense in the world for her to have gone to.

She lies buried at Boone, Des Moines, where she'd gone to live with her husband Gus.  She had 5 children, not the 2 stated in 1910, and 4 were living in 1900 (as correctly stated there) - Anna, Mae, Lotta and Earle but only the eldest has family - children Genevieve Eichenberger and Ashley Bowers.  Ashley's grandson is in England not far from his roots; while Genevieve's are still in Glen Ellyn or retired elsewhere in the States.

Ann is not the first relative I've come across who's balked at the chance to go overseas with her widowed father or mother.  Elizabeth Swanton and her cousin Sarah Mullins both said 'no thank you' to the chance to go to Australia (in 1852) and Ohio (in 1836).  Sarah was already married, so the decision wasn't hers.

Ann was only 17 and had the perfect opportunity to emigrate while single, just as her aunt Hannah had 17 years earlier:

It's no coincidence that Anna was the name of her first child.  Had she waited any longer she would have been rushed off to Cape Province, before you can say 'gold'.

Ironically, maybe her life was harder in America than it would have been in Africa.  The Cottys did well and money was flowing in.  Whereas Ann had to return to Chicago after years out in Des Moines - was she happy about that I wonder.  Her aunt and cousins were around, and hopefully stayed in touch: newspaper articles would confirm.

Facebook for finding cousins

I never thought I'd hear myself say this, but thank goodness for Facebook.  It may have no content whatsoever but it does glue people together in all sorts of interesting ways.

It really doesn't much matter if your security settings are set to (what you think is) maximum, chances are you profile pictures at least are shown to everyone.  And if you're female, one of your friends is very likely to have commented on it.

Plus about two-thirds of people show who all their Friends are anyway.  I have lately been using Facebook to help find members of highly mobile families who just aren't in the same place for long.  Or whose street addresses change more than their email address.

I had a target-list of several branches of mine that have disappeared from touch any time in the last 50+ years:
* the Rev'd L S Creed of Cape Town
* Mr F B Lowry of Durban (both uncles of my Granny)
* the Busherts of Rock Island
* the Eichenbergers of Glen Ellyn (both in Illinois descendants of my Ansford Felthams)
and of course the Haine family of northern Natal

Facebook came through with all of them.  I picked the most unusual names in the tree and hoped to find them - in some cases I was going back to when my uncle was in Botswana and captured the details from back then, 40 years ago.  I found the people I hoped to find, in Canada, and in S. Africa.

I was particularly keen to find Mandy, born 1959 in northern Natal, and she appeared as if by magic.  I was searching through all the Haine's were listed as from Africa, and one family stuck out - listed as a friend for one whose friends were public was Mandy, clearly an aunt, living in Alaska.  When I checked her middle name, that was a match, her maiden name also popped up on another site, the year of birth matched, and the place of study in Natal.  I plan to send a letter in the post - the old-fashioned way.

Not a bad result at all.  I should have done this years ago - but had resisted as it felt far too close to spying on people.  I plan to keep this for overseas relatives where the options for finding them are more limited.

No feet in Africa

.. but it's still possible to unravel the family's story.  My relative Rob Haine left England around 1900 for a new life in South Africa with his brothers. They ended up in Jo'burg, but he found a farm on the east coast.  He was leaving a land with plenty of fairly accessible records, for a land that until recently, had none.

We saw glimpses of him again - in 1960 his cousin died intestate in Somerset and in the ensuing document, 6 of his 7 kids were named.  In 2009 his wife's niece died in Somerset and her family gave me an old address in Durban, but that didn't lead me anywhere.

I published a book on the family in 2000 and we still didn't know their whereabouts, then.

Last year FamilySearch released some protestant church records for Natal, and I eagerly set to combing through for Haine's.  It wasn't hard to find the family, as the records were mostly indexed.  Although it said marriages for the town weren't listed after 1955, I found the index went up to 1970.  I combed through this looking for the bride, as the dot-matrix index from 1992 listed the marriage in groom order.  Bingo - I found of Rob's granddaughters marrying in 1958 and the other in 1966.

But it was the youngest granddaughter, Mandy, born 1959 I was due to find next.  And it wasn't through googling, through the phone book, but through another resource that I found her.

Thank you FamilySearch for great Natal records and unblocking a 15-year puzzle; without, sadly, me having to set a foot on the continent.

Britons in Africa

Africa United was a great movie.  I seem to remember getting pressurised to watch it while somewhere really unexpected like the University of London students' union or a socialist demonstration, or possibly strolling through Mayfair.  We need to be united in our search for records in Africa.

Britons in Africa is now online.  It is a showcase database, enabling people to be surprised at finding one of their folks on the great unexplored continent.  The Stirling Castle, Dublin Castle, Walmer Castle and a dozen other Union-Castle ships could get you to a new life in as little as 23 days.

However, until recently, those 23 days could see your descendants in England closing the door completely on your life, as no genealogical information was obtainable from South Africa, which became a Republic (after Afrikaaner-dominated voting) in 1961.

Now, on FamilySearch, Natal marriage records are online (to 1955) and Zimbabwe deaths, in a somewhat crude index up to the last days of Ian Smith.  It looks like the card indexes were hurled out on the table and rapidly photographed before possible destruction by the incoming government.  Who knows.  It's great to have them.

These new databases that allow us to follow our relatives around the world, should be applauded.

Lost memories

I am still cross nearly 20 years later about a missing letter.  My great-grandmother had several cousins and most of them had names that fitted her own social standing - Joyce Summers, Una Hatch, Ellen Glover.  One of these, another Una, wrote to me in 1996 at Burchett's Green College, Berkshire.  I can just see the letter now, perched behind the bar which was where all student correspondence was kept.  Slipping down behind a steamy dishwasher or falling into a pile of bills.  Never to see the light of day again.

After Una's death, her son remembered the letter. Yes she had written one, he said, and it had been full of family information.  At the time he hadn't been interested, but now that he was, could he have a copy of the letter!  I suppose I could fax him an image of a nice clean beer glass, post him a box of big blue cleaning roll, or hand him the keys of the now-closed college for him to search himself.

Hard-to-swallow

It was something of a shock to discover that a large number of Gladys's cousins weren't upper middle-class at all.  Some of them weren't even middle-class.

Much of the blame for this lies on uncle Arthur Smith, who is edited out so fiercely from the family tree, that leaves you wondering if the official records are in error.  Gladys claimed there was only one uncle and he was variously listed as '?' or William. Clearly you weren't expected to ask too much about him, still less enquire if there was yet another uncle.

But there was, and he'd come to London during the gasworkers' strikes of the 1890s, to work as a blacklegger.  He stayed long enough to sire 12 children, before allegedly going off to Australia (this story borne out by two separate branches of the family).  It says a lot for the widow that most of the children survived and several fought in the First World War.  They didn't really leave Bermondsey much, and the thought of them ever meeting their Muswell Hill cousins does leave one pondering.  It would be about as socially awkward as the Edwardians could devise.

A tidal wave of news came pouring in from Bermondsey - I even rang up one of the cousins who lived in the towers near Millwall.  A pint at the Hobgoblin got us going, but I'd need more than a pint to take in 90 years of missing history.  These memories weren't so much lost as scattered to the four corners of south-east London.

I don't feel the 92 boxes of Jim Mortimer's life as trade union leader and Labour Party official fit into my notion of my family at all - yet he had been married to Arthur Smith's granddaughter.

Hard-to-find

With all this talk of Arthur it was easy to forget there was another brother, William Smith.  What had happened to him?  I knew that he was born in England in 1851, and surprisingly, this was pretty much nearly all that was required to find him - in Jamestown.  Hard-to-find?  I don't think so.

This time he brought yet another factor into the equation.  Supposing all my calculations are correct, Gladys now numbers among her cousins the wonderfully-named Victoria Ulander, wife of Axel.

A sense of who she was

It bothered me for ages that more and more data was accumulating about the lives of the Chappell children - who were orphaned in 1867 and who did more and more interesting things.  Several new members emerged as well.  All of these were notionally under the auspices of their mother and grandmother Mrs Jane Chappell who survived until 1925 age 95.  This age may not be so remarkable today, but consider her oldest brother left England in 1832 to practically found the colony of Tasmania.  That she survived the majority of her nephews and nieces (one of whom left her a legacy in her will as if resigned to the fact she would live forever).  And because many of the generations rolled around so quickly, there was barely a year after 1900 when some new significant thing didn't happen.

We got closer to real human memories with a surprise letter from great-granddaughter Eileen.  It shouldn't have been a surprise as it was in reply to mine- but I was innured to non-response.  I'd phoned great-great-granddaughter Eileen who was interested to see there was this other Eileen.  But other Eileen wrote me screeds and I left it too late to meet her, I think.  Not sure of Jane's role here, but her eldest son apparently lost her the farm.

James Chappell's will from 1867 records Thomas Haine as a witness.  And one of the Haine boys later took over his farm, Manor Farm, now the site of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve at Yeovilton.  So if the Chappell boy gambled away the farm, how did one of the Haine's get it?

58 years later, Jane's obituary tells us nothing at all - she is absent from it.  The closest we get is her own son's obituary in Decatur, Illinois.  He'd done well for himself and the paper wrote at his passing (and boy did he look tired) of his venerable mother back in England.  I feel this gave Jane a role and in lieu of photographs, stories, this is at least something.

For other female members in this family, there's nothing.  I have a character-filled photograph for one, a clearly chequered life for another, a decent obituary here, but for one or two women there's nowt.

Turning it around

When cousin Joyce died a few years following first contact, my heart sank.  She'd never after all told me anything of her mother's eight siblings, only that they existed.  I had no names, or if I did that's all there were.  It was tough to get any information.

One Christmas, 19 years after finding out about them, I decided to interrogate freebmd, and emerge with some credible identifications of the Taylor siblings that I knew about, including Mary L.

Incredulously, I found only one Mary L Taylor matched.  The data seemed to tell me she died in Queensferry, Flintshire in 1951, leaving a will.  That was one sibling sorted.  It was all ok, but everyone was dead.  The one thing Joyce had revealed was a cousin Rhona still up in North Wales.  Combing through all the births in Wales showed only one girl who matched.  Lucky or what?  I did write her a letter, but chances like this needed another approach.  By bicycle.  I cycled off the border hills and into Mold, and was able to get an hour with Rhona at her bungalow.  She even guided me back down the hill into Queensferry as a bonus.

The short of it is that 120 years after Grandpa's aunt died, the resulting Taylor offspring have now been pinned through stories and photographs and those nearly lost memories have been properly found.

Exhumed but not identified

There was a right rumpus in 2005.  The developers rammed their bulldozers into an old family crypt at Highfield, Burnside, South Australia.  It's a heritage area, and it sounds a bit embarrassing.  It took a bit of effort to identify the bodies and the next of kin of the Drews (who used to own the property) were found and added some helpful hints from old letters they had.

I stumbled on all this via a google search for Sophia Dauncey and her husband Joseph.  Last seen at their wedding in Somerset in 1810 and not leaving any obvious traces since that time.  - Until the discovery of their bodies in 2005 and the subsequent newspaper coverage and web traffic.  There was even a headline 'Who was Mrs Dauncey?' asked by the residents of Kangaroo Island, seemingly in possession of a main street named after Sophy.

Well I got onto it.

There were lots of clues, but the one thing I knew for sure was the Edward Drew wasn't the brother of Sophia, who I was pretty certain was a Lucas.  However when I looked for marriages for Edward, one name and location jumped out at me 'Bristol, Sophia Cook' in 1830.  This seemed possible.  When I looked for possibles for Sophia's baptism, I found myself as I usually do, back in Baltonsborough, Somerset.  In this case, the year was 1804.

When I shook the database a little bit more, I found out yet again that Sophia's mother was a Lucas.

So, good.  We have two Sophias.  One was the wife of Edward Drew, and the other was her aunt, Mrs Dauncey.  All fairly tidy - but enough to confuse a lot of newspapers and by no means as quick to pin down as this little blog implies.

So to recap,
Carey Lucas and his wife Susannah married in 1772 and had a nine-year gap, then:
* Elizabeth Lucas was born 1781 at Baltonsborough 'Bolsbury' and evidently baptised as part of the Hardman Chapel circuit (died 1839)
after some more kids, came:
* Sophia Lucas born 1791 and baptised 1792 at Mr Hardman's Chapel (evidently in South Petherton)
she witnessed my ancestor's marriage in 1805 in Baltonsborough
and introduced the name Sophia into the family
and married herself in 1810 to Joseph Dauncey, later the farm manager at Highfield.  No kids.

(I still have no idea why my distant aunt gave her child the name Sophia Lucas in 1818 as there was no quick connection to this Sophia.)

Elizabeth Lucas (1781-1839) married James Cook of Keinton Mandeville (d 1850) and had four children Sophia, Mary, Matthew and Sarah of whom only the first two were baptised (and Matthew as an adult).

Sophia Cook we believe married Edward Drew at 1830 in Bristol and emigrated to Australia on the Lalla Rookh together, with their 2 children and with Drew's nephew Samuel (from Stoke sub Hambdon).  Drew himself was from Odcombe near Yeovil, son of Samuel Drew senr and Jean Geard, who'd married at Montacute.

Mary Cook may have married John Pippen at East Pennard in 1830, and had a daughter Jane who quite probably married Thomas Stafford the stoker at Bristol 1852 and most likely died 1855 leaving no issue.

Edward's descendants may have died out, but the tale of the overgrown crypt hasn't quite, yet.  So that wraps it all up.  And if anyone wants to quibble about the beautiful stone inscription (above), there's no need. Sophia would have been a sister to Edward, even if the actual explanation involves a lot more people.

Postscript, found this on Ancestry:

Elizabeth Drew with the Daunceys in 1841, Martin Street, Baltonsborough:

Ann Waterman was born in Somerton, daughter of Charles Waterman and his wife Frances Maria Dauncey (from Baltonsborough) - who were with their other children in London.

COULD the contact below pls contact me again - ideally with email address.  Comment won't go live but I can then pick up the message and contact you direct.  Elizabeth and her mother both named in Sophia Dauncey's will...

Finding lost cousins: the power of the internet

This second post is in response to Peter Calver's posting on Lost Cousins.com.

I fully endorse the importance of contacting living relatives against the impotence of transcribing public records which have already been indexed.

The one-stop shop for me to locate distant cousins is 192.com. I have been happily using this site for years. I recently traced a relative to the Sevenoaks postal area. The address format was House name, road name, village name, town name (Sevenoaks). It didn't take long to establish the cousin lived in London Road, West Kingsdown. I then had dozens of relevant postcodes to try followed by ten or more possible house names, but I got there. Many times people opt out of the electoral roll but the phone book reveals they're still at their 2002 address, or nearby. I do a cross check to ensure that the phone book entry doesn't refer to another family listed elsewhere on the roll.

In the good old days 192 would serve up the full postcode if you just guessed the first three components e.g. TW10 8. Also you could guess place names by their format try this one XX. XXXX-XX-XXX, XXXX. But that wasn't ideal as in those days the postal area and county were not shown, so it could be a long hunt.

A later bug on 192.com meant you could copy and paste the concealed address into Notepad and the full latitude and longitude of the address would appear. That was an early Christmas present from the company.

I still use the site and have two useful tips for family history searchers:

1) In some browsers you are not restricted on the number of searches you can make. This helps when you are trying to find someone but have limited information.

2) That by monitoring where your cousin appears in the ranked list of results, and having a local streetmap at your side you can work out in which cluster of streets your relative lives, with just a few searches. I use Proviser to get all roadnames from a given postcode prefix.

I have heard back from a woman in New Zealand who has overcome disability to secure paid work for herself (a true heroine). She was shocked and excited to learn she had family in England, and we can now put her in touch with her uncle here thanks to these four sites:

a) Genes Reunited for helping me find Ellen, born 1852 in Buxton, grandmother of the two siblings. Very hard to find because she married four times nowhere near her birthplace.
b) 192.com for providing the address of the uncle's daughter in Cheshire at no cost
c) NZ government for the death cert for the long lost sister, who had married in that country
d) Google for an address for the niece in North Island

So get in touch with your cousins today!

Finding lost cousins: the strength of weak bonds

The Lost Cousins website is terrific. I am 'agnostic' about the matching service itself, as I'll explain. I avidly read the regular newsletter which comes out in good chunky quantities. I am perhaps destined to be a late adopter of the website.

I find the most rewarding research partnerships come from finding cousins who haven't got years of experience, as these are greater in number and much more likely to have a dormant or incomplete profile on Genes Reunited. I have posted over 120 letters to new cousins I've proactively sought in the last year, most residing in England, most found through either an address at probate or a search for free at 192.com, and importantly, most replying. On LostCousins I found two relatives who match my attributes rather precisely, middle-class, administrators, web savvy. Whereas what provides the synergies in research are acquaintances you barely know, the 'strength of weak bonds', so called. And what could be a weaker bond than 6th cousinship! I have dined like a prince next to Queens Park golf course, had a personal tour of the Free Church N2 and to show it's not all posh, carried an inebriated (lost?) cousin up the steps of his tower block shortly after he confided some valuable information to me in the pub. So these weak bonds powerfully opened the doors to new terrain.

I prefer to be pro-active in my research. I hunt for specific cousins on Genes Reunited who are most likely to be able to help. I've even extracted data from Genes where the cousin themself was reluctant to tell me anything. They hinted of their descent from a couple, Mr and Mrs Smith, who I knew were uncle and niece. Despite the common name, from the information publicly available on Genes I was able to discreetly identify the line of descent, though I've no wish to alert them to the irregular marriage.

My goal is usually to identify a good cousin, who is likely to reply to my letter, and then to retrieve a mailing address for them and write to this warm lead.

A photographic haul at the station

Very excited as just come back from trip to cousin in Devon with large haul of 500 digital images- photos, postcards, documents, letters. It is pretty comprehensive for my Carlines and Aireys, who were Northcountry folk, while our component branch rested for the main part in North London. There were some oddities - my grandmother turns out to have been baptised at the church where I have for the last two years helped run a Cub Scout Pack. My small cousins are evidently at school in a very lovely setting in Dorset which I know intimately from having walked around it with my sister on our 'early morning runs'. Kath Davies writes a letter of condolence to her aunt on the death of her uncle. Kath's last remaining child died a week ago, (74 years later). Kath could never have written that letter of condolence.

Finally there is a photograph for grandma's grandma Ellen Carline, and she is sitting in her chair to boot - was the photograph thus taken at home? I have seen the chair, a Windsor, much more comfortable than it looks. Ellen looks a stoic as well she might having seen off an alcoholic husband yet provided so fully for her children that her estate was not finally resolved until 1976, three-quarters of a century after her demise, and around the time of my own birth. I was further able to compare her photograph with that of her cousin W B Hannan, the Jamaican farmer, and I was pleased to report a significant similarity. Their cousin 'H E C' sends a postcard of the Eyam Plague memorial service of 1902 with a pinhole through the likeness of herself and her (deceased) husband. Having scanned in the image, I'm now not sure where the pinhole was.

Another postcard begins with the words 'Dear Cousin' and is signed E Turner, of Woodseats, Sheffield 1911. It may be that the word 'cousin' is my fevered imagination, but I'd like to yet think that Mrs Turner might prove to be a granddaughter perhaps of John Bagshaw, needle grinder of Sheffield - Ellen's uncle (update: unfevered and corroborated).  It's most pleasant to have this deluge of information from the past, though I'm sanguine that it may be the last for a little while.

Mystifying motives: the 1911 census index

Interestingly the 1911 census has twice listed relatives on the form and then these were crossed off so they DON'T appear in the index! One of these was Ellen Elizabeth Cooke (really Cook) who was a nurse in Stoke on Trent living with her aunt Hannah. Ellen must have got called in to the hospital or something as she is deleted from the form and missing entirely from the indexed census. Very strange. Without that deleted line I would never have found Ellen's lovely granddaughter a piano teacher in Derbyshire who has her photographs and stories.
Ellen was born in 1881, and her parents died shortly afterwards. She isn't living at home in 1891 nor in 1901, so without the 1911 census, we'd never have known about her.

Reply from BrightSolid 18 Sept 2010
-----------------------------------
Good afternoon,

Thank you for your email.

If the entries are crossed out on the original page they will not be included in our transcript as the individuals would not be present when the census was being recorded.

Best regards,

FindMyPast Support Team

Comment
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Here’s my gruntworthy reply from the usually on-the-money bright solid. The whole point of the index and indeed the interest family historians have in the data, isn’t to know precisely whether a given relative was at home though this is nice, nor to have an exact list of who WAS at home (with the implicit assurance that those who bedded down elsewhere must strictly be omitted). No! It’s to capture all and sundry data which could be useful genealogically. An index which omits this data to satisfy notional and conflicting criteria does not serve the genealogical community well!

The written word is back: in praise of letters

I tread a different path from Churchill's daughter Lady Mary Soames, who recently eulogised the late letter, whose estate has been entailed to its fast thoughtless cousin, E Male.

I have had some success in contacting family relatives by letter, from across the chasm of time, and a couple of hundred miles and several regional accents in space. It can take as little as half an hour to find a cousin on the internet these days, and yet you can make your letter look as if you've been scrabbling through gravestones and quaint newspaper cuttings to beat a path to their door.

People will on the whole be very happy to have a letter from you, but it may take time to reply, and they may never get round to it. It could take a couple of years for a reply to arrive, perhaps from a grandson or cousin who is given the letter at a later date.

I might upload some sample letters that have worked, to this blogosphere. However, there is no template. Success could be as high as 70%, and it depends on a few factors:

1) Making sure the letter is properly personalised, tailored to the recipient. I tend to do a slightly different style for men than I do for women.
2) Making sure you have the right address and that the recipient is still alive and is in fact the person you seek.

3) The letter needs to make sense to the person receiving it, which means:
• Giving a bit of a handle on what kind of person you are through tone of voice, old world courtesy or by clearly siting yourself at the friendly end of the inquisitive/psychotic spectrum
• Mentioning some names, places or an occupation which will ring bells with the recipient and put them at ease, or give them a warm fuzzy glow
• Remembering that people are enormously trusting and won’t doubt you, particularly if you are penning your letter by hand with a British residential return address
• Avoid starting your letter with ‘Dear Mr Starcher, I am studying all the Starchers in Englandshire, and my book is priced keenly at £19.95 making an enormous coffee table gift for you and a loved one’... or anything that looks like a sale/con/chain letter

4) Leave the door open to future communication, but don't indicate that you expect anything. Make some options for their response subtly apparent: they can email back, use the self-addressed stamped envelope, 'add to the tree', write back a short note, pass the letter on to cousins who ARE interested, or they can decide not to get in touch at all. Once you've established contact, do maintain it, and be prepared for a second wave of revelations. You might find sending out a questionnaire could be useful. I’ve never done this myself, but , but I've seen examples where it has worked. Questions might be: What was your father's occupation. At which addresses or streets did the family live? What did your parents do during the War?

5) Select your target carefully: there are myriad considerations. Do you write to the eldest or youngest child, man or woman, those living near or far from the ancestral homeland? Are there any upsetting facts which will determine to whom you write and what you tell them? The ideal candidate is about 40, has watched Who do you think you are? has seen the Genes reunited ads on Friends reunited, is female, has a parent living (perhaps nearby), has time to answer your letter, has a working computer (or no computer at all), is at home a fair bit, isn’t busy when your letter arrives, lives near to the ancestral homeland but not in it, has occasion to have pleasant recollections of impressions of the past, and has a story of their own that they can (proudly) tell. They might also be interested in history, or they might live near good walking country. I found a piano teacher living on her own in the Peak district, and I was sure she would reply, as indeed she did. Our ideal correspondent needs not to have inherited property by stealth, else they possess the parallel attribute of barking frostily at callers ‘how did you get this number?’

6) If you must call, get ready for rejection, and run through roleplay endlessly until you feel sick. I've done this twice as an adult and felt very ill before and elated after. The two key people I called were fairly useful (invaluable at the time), but in hindsight I’d picked the wrong targets. Write letters instead.

Good luck with your letters - I'm sure they will go down very well.

Glossop folks

Glossop folks
I started out with 13 Bagshaw siblings – now I’ve run them all to ground except one who was yet unmarried at 46, so I’m not too worried about her – but where did she go I wonder!
The children were: John, William, Mary Ann, Edmund, Sarah, Ann, Ellen, Mary, Millicent, Hannah, Elizabeth Jane, Edmund, Joseph Nathaniel
DIED YOUNG
Mary Ann – not living in 1841
Edmund – not living in 1841
Edmund – not living in 1841
Joseph Nathaniel – confirmed by deaths index for 1840
We know that nine children were living in 1843 from their father’s will and we know that these must be: John, Ann (from gravestones), Sarah, Mary, Millicent, Hannah, Elizabeth Jane from the 1851 census. William and Ellen were still alive in 1841 living respectively with their parents, and sister Ann. This does not prove that they were still alive in 1843 (and thus two of the nine), but we now know this to be the case anyway.
GRAVESTONES
John – buried with his parents, date of death given as 1855 which ties him in as husband to Tabitha Handley and needle grinder in Sheffield. Also his youngest sister Jane was living with him there age 10. Died before his mother
Ann – buried with her parents, given as wife of Hugh Carr, who’d married at Bakewell in 1839. Died 1859, before her mother. Thanks very much to wishful-thinking.org.uk for getting my started with these siblings.
CENSUS
Ellen – found in 1861 census as Ellen Hannan in Birmingham. Subsequently found her marriage and a remarriage both in that city, and the full story including her move to Stoke-on-Trent, where the majority of her descendants still live. She named two children after her parents and her father’s occupation as miner is given on her marriage. Died 1878.
Mary – had a daughter Hannah Berresford who appears as niece in the 1881 census with her aunt Hannah. Tracking back to the 1871 census we guessed that her mother was Mary Bagshaw and we then found Mary’s marriage in 1866 in Sheffield which proved this. Mary was then 42, and had already had a son out of wedlock many years earlier. Died 1873.
MARRIAGE RECORDS
Hannah – (died 1901)
Jane – found their double marriage (at Eyam) in 1861, the year after their mother’s death. We then found them in the census and could see Jane had many daughters – one (Hannah) became the wife of one of the Carrs, linking the two families together further. Died 1916 – having survived many of the next generation. She lived in Slatelands Road, Glossop, hence the subject of this post.
PROBATE
William – the last to be run to ground, William. We found the record of his probate entry on Ancestry, conducting a probate index search for Bagshaws in Derbyshire. This document not only proves his death details (in 1848 in New York State), but links him firmly with his Eyam origins, and identifies him as the father of Elizabeth Bagshaw Benson. Finally it provides a current address for her mother twenty years later, under her new married name. Died before his mother.
LASTLY
My own great-great-great-grandmother, Millicent, who died 1881. We knew what happened to her.

GLOSSOP
This was the home of Elizabeth Jane Bagshaw, who had four married daughters. Of the three surviving, only Ann lived in Glossop. Ann’s grandson still live on High Street West.
Millicent Carr (daughter of Ann) had several children born in Glossop, and one of them (Robert Knott) married Eveline Jane Higginbottom in 1911.
Christine Margaret, a descendant through various Margarets and Ellens, from Ellen Bagshaw, has moved back to Brassington, Derbyshire from her native Stoke-on-Trent.

Finding Edward Jones

I've had some luck with my Bagshaw Carr connection. T G Carr left a will in 1919 naming lots of known relatives and a couple of new ones, particularly one, nephew 'Edward Jones', who had been plaguing me ever since this will arrived in the mail. I have finally found Edward. It turns out T G's eldest sister Martha Ann was the responsible party. The 1881 census for Liverpool makes it all look so easy, provided you knew what you were looking for. Martha A Jones is listed, with a son Edward, plus some daughters too. Her birthplace, Eyam, and age given match also. Still without specifically looking for her as Jones in this particular census you would have come a cropper. She married in Sheffield in 1862 and then remarried at Bootle in 1877 finally becoming the much needed Mrs Jones. I would like to acknowledge Lancashire bmd for hurtling me down this genealogical bobsleigh. I asked it which Carrs had married a Jones and it thoughtfully provided the Bootle 1877 couple listing Martha as both Healey, a corruption of her first married name, and Carr, her well beloved maiden name. I've found a Jones child, Erminie, wife of Harold Robert Butler. I plan now to run Edward to earth despite his fiendishly common, or in Heirhunters parlance,'bad', last name.

I have now found Edward's baptism and marriage and made a dangerous assumption that he had a son lately living in the Wirral, bp: 26 Oct 1879 St Martin in the Fields Liverpool; marr: 23 Jun 1901 St Athanasius Kirkdale, Liverpool.  I will now get the will of his sister which would struggle to add to the recent haul.

Update: the sister's will and existence confuses everything. Her heiress Ilene is upset at the illegitimacy involved. A third sister's existence in Manchester is stated and proving hard to iron out. Edward Jones, our original man, got his son through Wharton and lived to see his super-feminist granddaughter Barbara G Jones (Walker) born.

On being, irrr, 26, and facing death duty indexes

Oh what fun we had.  This is the sort of totally gemsmithery you can yield from a day digging at TNA's luscious IR26 reserves.  You don gloves, foam pads and reader-ticket, and then the page-turning records are all yours.

Check out this beauty: next of kin are named as the legatee died in the testatrix's sister's lifetime, before the money could be shared out to her.  This name's Frances Buck's daughter as Mary Lane, which we knew, but not for certain - it also confirms that there were no other surprise children for Frances.

You would look up the testatrix on http://www.findmypast.co.uk's Death Duty Indexes (IR27) which you can do if you know the year the will was proved and the last name of the deceased.  Here is the entry for Rosamond Lane of Wymondham, confirming probate happened in Norwich in 1844 with the magic folio number (241) being given at the end of the line.

You can now go to the new IR26 catalogue at http://haine.org.uk/wills/IR26_catalogue.htm where you can thus identify IR26/1680 as being the one you need - see this snippet as an example.

I had about a dozen IR26 records I wanted to check at Kew and couldn't believe how difficult it was to get the appropriate references.  One had to guess one's way around TNA catalogue by putting in what reference you THOUGHT might cover the required year and surnames.  A few other people had had problems, or had considered making a separate trip to Kew purely to consult the printed catalogue.  I spent two solid days in the heat making it my mission to extract the catalogue entries relating to IR26, which I was successfully able to do.  At one point I was on a train from Doncaster to Newark Northgate, where I knew I had only 3 minutes to change trains.  I shouldn't have even been in Doncaster but I guess I missed my stop.  On this leg of my journey I was standing up, holding the laptop as I used the 20mins and fading battery for yet more valuable processing time.  At one point I was struggling with four 200 MB files, with just my MS-DOS friend 'ssr' for company.

I did get to Kew last week with my reference numbers and a bill (not a phone bill - though it doesn't say so on TNA's site) and saw some pretty awesome records.  My favourite is will of 4xgreat-grandpa Lancelot Gibson who leaves £50 to the representatives of his brother William Gibson, legacy to be paid after the death of his widow.  These are named in the estate duty records as being: Mary Tate, Ann Gibson and two male Gibsons.  I was able to find the marriage of Mary Gibson, Q3 1860 Carlisle RD, to Thomas Tait and corresponding entries in the censuses thereafter which seemed highly likely.  For a long time I thought the 1860 marriage was too late as Lance was dead by then, but in fact though he was dead his estate carried on recording pertinent facts which are completely missing from the will.  I could never have positively identified Mary Gibson were it not for this document, nor would I have known about the Tait connection, as the Carlisle marriage was nowhere near the Gibson heartland.

In the event I found out lots about 'Mary Tate', including obtaining a recipe book written by her granddaughter at the time of World War One.

John Lain's IR26 record listed the children of his niece, who, being a woman was given only a life interest in his residuary estate - the children are certainly not listed in the will

William Whittock's IR26 record shows the children of his late brother, who had died in Philadelphia.  In the will the wording is terse - we certainly don't get the full married names provided here.

So, should anyone ask, YES, it is worth exploring IR26 records, but do make use of finding aids and get organised so that your day at Kew with the old books is a profitable one.

I believe in free wills

In double-quick time I got nearly 100 transcripts of wills proven between 1858 and 1925.

These were obtained *for free* at London LDS family history centre, 20 on the afternoon of Tuesday 11 August 2009.  Who says you have to pay for family history – this would have been £90 in wills had I bought them (which I never would).

It’s amusing that the biggest leads came from the references to ‘Jane Williams’ and ‘Mary Price’.  Ok Mary had a massive telltale middlename of ‘Orledge’ which made it impossible *not* to find her.

(Curiously there is an 'Ordnance connection' - Jane's sons-in-law worked for Ordnance Survey in Southampton.  Mary lived in Ordnance Road, Enfield Wash.)

Jane Williams was a bit less of a cheat.  I knew from the context that this Jane must have been born a Hambly in Gwinear, Cornwall, 1826 so using some of this information helped me find her marriage in freebmd (Jane to  Samuel Williams, 1847 Cornwall) and this led me to find her in the 1861 census (Jane Williams born about 1826 Gwinear, wife of Samuel) and then with the family details listed to find her in the 1881 census where she is just Jane Williams born about 1826 ‘in Cornwall’.  But there are very few Williamses in Hampshire, and fewer Cornish ones, so I was actually able to find not only Jane but all bar one of her children's marriages (to William Tawse, John White, Betty Stoneley, Richard Jones, Rosa Burden, Charles Morris, Frederick Lewington).

Mary Price's own helpful will gives the full names of her seven children which again made misidentification really tricky – particularly as there just weren’t many Welsh Prices still less English ones in English Enfield Lock.

I wrote a little program to help people find wills like how I did - http://haine.org.uk/wills/willsearch.php

Willed away

Somewhat cheaper than my foray into propping up the government with my certificate order (£210), the 14 wills I lately purchased weighed in at 'only' £70.

In fact one of them wasn't even a will but a single sheet grant of administration, purchased to learn the address of the intestate lady's nephew Arthur Ward in Peterborough.

This was one of the seven wills (and grant) which I would class as very useful, the remainder letting me down as follows
1) no relatives were named
2) no mention of the testator's sister or her family
3) very cryptic with no relationships given and no clue as to where people fitted into the tree, if at all
4) everything was left to a known individual

BUT on the whole the seven that were very useful led me to major family history breakthroughs
1) to living descendants of Emily Padfield (Hemmings) who have photos, stories to tell and an interest in family history
2) to the only known descendant of Sergeant Stephen Read by his Cornish wife, through Quebec, Glasgow, Liverpool, Clevedon and now Denmark
3) finally a lead to the family of Henry Young of Andover and his wife Lucy, whose 15-odd children born in the late 1800s had proved surprisingly difficult to bring down to the present day
4) closing the door on the 'spinster' daughters of my Charles Warren of Maperton, two of whom had taken husbands late in life in locations I would not have expected and could not have traced
5) a small step forward in finding Tom Garner's family.  I could have got their address way back in 1993 when I first learnt about the Garners from Dad's cousin Tom, however I had no idea then, that they were related.  Still this will moves me slightly closer to regaining this lost address
6) the wonderful will of Rowena Homily, three-times married and of uncertain parentage.  No clue who many of the recipients are, but I'm sure we'll find out as we zone in on the records.
7) the address of Arthur Ward as above

Most of the 400 wills I've bought (and seen many more) were acquired at least ten years ago when they were practically free, but I'm confident I'll be using this great resource again soon, adding as they do so much colour to our family trees.  (And no-one really knows much about how to use them, yet!)

Truly certifiable

The price of birth, marriage and death certificates took a hike recently from £7.00 to £9.20.  So I decided it was time to donate a pot of gold to the government and buy a lot of certificates while they still cost less than a starter at the Ivy.

Of the thirty certificates I ordered I had problems with seven:

1) Joseph Carter born 1919 Hull turned out not to be the son of Minnie Hebbard but of Gertrude Hebbard.  This was carelessness

2) Robert Gray born 1924 Salisbury turned out not to be the son of Mary Annie Maidment but of another Miss Maidment.  This too was carelessness

3) Jane A Gibson died 1923 Kendal was not mine - I'd not combed the death indexes properly so mea culpa again

4) William McKee died 1927 in Liverpool turned out not to be mine - but it was tough to have known for sure, so I'll let myself off here

5) Irene Antony died 2002 - they sent me the wrong certificate (which they are going to replace, though it's taking two months, there's no rush)

6) Catharine Creed married 1871.  I mistakenly ordered the certificate under her married name of 'Bell', so this is another wasted buy - though they did refund me £3

7) Alice Dauncey married 1917 wasn't my Mabel Alice but another woman.  I couldn't have known for sure though, so I'm glad I got this document.

Two further death certificates gave me precious little information as the partner was still living, or the deceased person was living in a nursing home with no named heirs.

The remaining 21 certificates were all full of useful information.

The BIRTHS gave me address, father's occupation, child's date of birth

Child's date of birth ought to have been stunningly useful, to enable me to find their subsequent death using this search field and their first names.  But there were NO Ethels born 20 Aug 1908, Kathleen 14 Jan 1917 nor Patricia 8 May 1923.  Very unhelpful and mildly vexacious!

The DEATHS gave me cause of death, family unit reconstruction, address, brother (brother-in-law) and children's address, circumstances of death, occupation, maiden name and new family information

The MARRIAGES gave me the leads I needed to move confidently forward with researching my five relatives Tamar Barnett, Ada Bray, William Samuel Jones, Rita Smith and Mavis Wood.

I had already contacted Ada's grandson but now I knew for sure he was a relative.

I was able to find Mavis living in East Grinstead so despatched a letter to her.

I couldn't find Rita Smith, but I was able to work out details of her husband's parents and brother which will help track her down.

And Tamar married into the Thompson family of Ancliffe Hall, so more details are expected in time.

In preparing my (flawed) list of thirty certificates, I did rule out 5-10 other buys, which I figured I could avoid by pursuing other, cheaper, genealogical search angles.  Further, I wanted to wait a couple of years until GRO certificates pre 1900 will finally be free, or very nearly.

I will avoid hitting the 'make payment now' button for quite some time on the GRO website, which in any event was truly Cthulian in its labyrinthian ordering structure.

you go and save the Hester last

Alright so Amy Dunkerton had already amazed me. She died in 1831 in Pilton, Somerset aged 40 but that hadn't stopped her fiesty daughters from carving their own futures:
* Caroline Amelia, married 1847 St James Piccadilly to a waiter
* Charlotte, married 1838 Sussex Gardens to a jeweller
* Sarah, married 1842 St Pancras Euston Road to a police constable

Excuse me weren't these ladies supposed to be home by five o'clock and what pray were they doing in London. Shouldn't they have been making sheep's eyes at the local farmer's sons back in Summerzet?

I have spent several dozen man-hours following up on the London descendants, and now for something unexpected.

The girls' father William Dunkerton left a will in 1855 and had then six daughters living, so in particular what had happened to the youngest, Hester? Died? Married young THEN died? Where was the marriage.

She'd married at St John's Chester (of course?!) in 1856 aged 31, to a young innkeeper and gone to bring up another slew of daughters at the Rossett Bridge Inn between Wrexham and Chester before dying ten years later (neatly avoiding most censuses). Thank you http://pilot.familysearch.org for this useful marriage entry.

These girls were every bit as interesting as their mother and aunts, here they are:
* Esther married 1886 Chester St John, a plumber of BANGOR
* Mary Ann married 1882 Wrexham, a tailor of WREXHAM
* Eleanor married 1884 Manchester, a labourer of NANTWICH
* Caroline married 1892 Islington, a restaurant cook of LUTON

Thanks to this lost and missing marriage entry I now have relatives in eastern Cheshire and in North Wales which is new and exciting territory.

One of the granddaughters was called Nellie Evans, but she proved absurdly easy to trace in Wrexham, to a sad death aged 29 in childbirth. I think I have had a very blessed couple of hours researching and should probably quit while I'm ahead.