Showing posts with label tricks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tricks. Show all posts
27 Jun 2015
Ten tricks to help your family history (for free!)
Here's some handy tips which I've gathered over the years to help me maintain my batting average of contacting two or three new cousins a month. It's high time your research got even easier, too!
6 Apr 2014
Making work for the postman
Of the 14 letters I finally sealed up today, 10 were to new cousins.
They were scattered around the edges of England with a disproportionate number (33%) in what was once Lancashire.
Few of the addresses were in the phone book - but luckily 192.com was on-hand to help me locate them. After learning the postcode area (for example DH7), I've taken to using a house price website called Proviser (example pages are from Bradford), to capture the full list of streets within that postcode area.
I also consult Google maps to see if there are other clues - relatives living nearby, or a geographical feature that would make one part or other of the area more likely. Within Proviser I note down the names of village settlements, for example within Blackburn there is Mellor. I double-check that the address I need doesn't include a village name.
Now I can whip through the list of streets in Proviser - including or excluding the villages as found by my earlier checking - and quickly narrow the field to the correct street. Possibly the longest search was for a relative in Walks Avenue (Manchester). It's a big old postcode area, couldn't easily be split up and W is right at the end of the alphabet.
Sometimes it makes sense to do a visual. When looking for an address by the Lakes, there just seemed to be a tonne of possible addresses - so I picked out some likely streets from looking at the map, and was proven correct.
If you are unlikely and your relative lives on a densely populated Old London Road (which tend to be rather long) there could be a lot of houses to the one postcode. Or worse, finding a relative lived in a tower block in Plymouth - there were at least 10 floors and in the order of 90 different properties all occupying the same thousand square foot.
It's useful if somebody on the property is in the phone book (not necessarily the person you expect) and if somebody's ever held a directorship. One trick I used in Liverpool at a down-at-heel neighbourhood, once very grand, was looking in the 1984 phone book to see if the address was given there. It was.
On the whole, it needn't take that long to search a postcode. The bulkiest areas can be divided into villages - and postcodes for central urban districts might only cover a few dozen streets. The worst area I searched was BB2 - 10 pages of addresses mostly all in Blackburn itself, so few could be eliminated (or focussed on) by determining if the address was/ was not in a surrounding village.
It can be embarrassing when you've spent ages pinning down your postcode and got the address only to find that the person was in the phone book all along. I was looking for a Richards family member in Romford and missing a possible entry in the phone book was understandable as it was just such a common name.
Another trick is to know the combination of names of a couple. I mentioned here how knowing that John B Jones had a wife Ann E enabled me to focus-in on the only couple in the country who shared this name-combo. (Name slightly changed to keep them anonymous.) For this highly mobile couple who'd lost contact with relatives 30 years ago, and had left their Midlands address 20 years ago, I needed a miracle to pin them down.
The site to use for comparing addresses with postcodes and vice versa is the Royal Mail's Postcode Finder. It used to offer only a measly 10 searches a day - which got you nowhere, particularly if you're still struggling to understand its search boxes. It's considerably more relaxed now, particularly since it's been sold out of our hands to the lowest bidder!
Once you've found your address, you still need to write the letter, prepare and include copies of documents, keep a photographic record of what you've sent and muster up sufficient envelopes, pens, stamps, paper, printer ink, and power cables to get the show on the road. In fact I recommend writing the address on the envelope as the very first thing you do - then at least the myriad documents can be filed in the correct place as you prepare for dispatch. I would certainly recommend sending a stamped-addressed envelope, unless you strongly suspect you'll be getting an email response.
As for writing the letter itself, some tips on this business can be found a few pages up.
It's now slightly more work than it used to be when I got all my addresses from wills, and later in the brief periods when electoral roll full results were easy to come-by. But I'd rather have all the information relatively easily than just a portion of the information ridiculously easily, which is how I'd describe family history 20 years ago... (Plus you never used to know until too late, just who was hiding behind those terse phone book entries.)
For today - some folk I've been hunting nearly 20 years, others turned up yesterday when I took a detour down a branch I'd not known existed. We will have to see what comes back.
They were scattered around the edges of England with a disproportionate number (33%) in what was once Lancashire.
Few of the addresses were in the phone book - but luckily 192.com was on-hand to help me locate them. After learning the postcode area (for example DH7), I've taken to using a house price website called Proviser (example pages are from Bradford), to capture the full list of streets within that postcode area.
I also consult Google maps to see if there are other clues - relatives living nearby, or a geographical feature that would make one part or other of the area more likely. Within Proviser I note down the names of village settlements, for example within Blackburn there is Mellor. I double-check that the address I need doesn't include a village name.
Now I can whip through the list of streets in Proviser - including or excluding the villages as found by my earlier checking - and quickly narrow the field to the correct street. Possibly the longest search was for a relative in Walks Avenue (Manchester). It's a big old postcode area, couldn't easily be split up and W is right at the end of the alphabet.
Sometimes it makes sense to do a visual. When looking for an address by the Lakes, there just seemed to be a tonne of possible addresses - so I picked out some likely streets from looking at the map, and was proven correct.
If you are unlikely and your relative lives on a densely populated Old London Road (which tend to be rather long) there could be a lot of houses to the one postcode. Or worse, finding a relative lived in a tower block in Plymouth - there were at least 10 floors and in the order of 90 different properties all occupying the same thousand square foot.
It's useful if somebody on the property is in the phone book (not necessarily the person you expect) and if somebody's ever held a directorship. One trick I used in Liverpool at a down-at-heel neighbourhood, once very grand, was looking in the 1984 phone book to see if the address was given there. It was.
On the whole, it needn't take that long to search a postcode. The bulkiest areas can be divided into villages - and postcodes for central urban districts might only cover a few dozen streets. The worst area I searched was BB2 - 10 pages of addresses mostly all in Blackburn itself, so few could be eliminated (or focussed on) by determining if the address was/ was not in a surrounding village.
It can be embarrassing when you've spent ages pinning down your postcode and got the address only to find that the person was in the phone book all along. I was looking for a Richards family member in Romford and missing a possible entry in the phone book was understandable as it was just such a common name.
Another trick is to know the combination of names of a couple. I mentioned here how knowing that John B Jones had a wife Ann E enabled me to focus-in on the only couple in the country who shared this name-combo. (Name slightly changed to keep them anonymous.) For this highly mobile couple who'd lost contact with relatives 30 years ago, and had left their Midlands address 20 years ago, I needed a miracle to pin them down.
The site to use for comparing addresses with postcodes and vice versa is the Royal Mail's Postcode Finder. It used to offer only a measly 10 searches a day - which got you nowhere, particularly if you're still struggling to understand its search boxes. It's considerably more relaxed now, particularly since it's been sold out of our hands to the lowest bidder!
Once you've found your address, you still need to write the letter, prepare and include copies of documents, keep a photographic record of what you've sent and muster up sufficient envelopes, pens, stamps, paper, printer ink, and power cables to get the show on the road. In fact I recommend writing the address on the envelope as the very first thing you do - then at least the myriad documents can be filed in the correct place as you prepare for dispatch. I would certainly recommend sending a stamped-addressed envelope, unless you strongly suspect you'll be getting an email response.
As for writing the letter itself, some tips on this business can be found a few pages up.
It's now slightly more work than it used to be when I got all my addresses from wills, and later in the brief periods when electoral roll full results were easy to come-by. But I'd rather have all the information relatively easily than just a portion of the information ridiculously easily, which is how I'd describe family history 20 years ago... (Plus you never used to know until too late, just who was hiding behind those terse phone book entries.)
For today - some folk I've been hunting nearly 20 years, others turned up yesterday when I took a detour down a branch I'd not known existed. We will have to see what comes back.
Miscellaneous marriage thoughts - Wales in Yorkshire
From the miscellaneous marriages listed on Ancestry:
I also found my lass from Wales, Kiveton Park, marrying in Jerusalem where she was working as a nurse in World War Two. Yes the name Wales, Kiveton Park is probably the most confusing ever; even more so as it's often written Wales, nr. Sheffield, or Wales, Nottinghamshire or Waleswood. Most county boundaries skirt neatly between towns, but Kiveton Park was a colliery that happened to sit on a border I'd never heard of - Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire. So it was able to flout the carefully planned registration districts, poor law unions and electoral constituencies. It's heart and soul seem to belong with Sheffield, not Worksop (its notional mother town), but I could be wrong about that.
See Kiveton Park and Wales history for more. I only stumbled on all this by accident, yesterday. I was about to wrap up a letter for a South African cousin (now in Dorset) when I noticed at the top of the tree the string of SHUGG siblings, from Gwinear, who'd multiplied considerably through to the present day. I noticed I'd never found marriages for Jane (1821) or Mary (1823). Could modern research tools help me locate them?
I was embarrassed to find this:
The excellent Cornwall Online Parish Clerk database was actually my first port-of-call. Confirming that Mary Shugg had died age 12, and that Jane was the only one of her generation, I was then launched into her modest-sized Trevaskus family who'd left Hayle, Cornwall for Devonport.
Missing from the censuses was their pint-sized daughter Grace who I eventually surmised had gone with husband Emmerson up to Kiveton Park shortly after her marriage. The mines there were some ten years old: her sister had had an earlier spell at Harthill, 3 miles away, but the sisters only overlapped for a year as the elder one decided to go back to Devonport after she was widowed.
Their daughter married a mining engineer and it was their girl who worked as a nurse in Jerusalem during World War Two, coming back to England for the birth of her daughter who still lives in the wider area.
Some clarification about the counties from Wikipedia:
I also found my lass from Wales, Kiveton Park, marrying in Jerusalem where she was working as a nurse in World War Two. Yes the name Wales, Kiveton Park is probably the most confusing ever; even more so as it's often written Wales, nr. Sheffield, or Wales, Nottinghamshire or Waleswood. Most county boundaries skirt neatly between towns, but Kiveton Park was a colliery that happened to sit on a border I'd never heard of - Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire. So it was able to flout the carefully planned registration districts, poor law unions and electoral constituencies. It's heart and soul seem to belong with Sheffield, not Worksop (its notional mother town), but I could be wrong about that.
See Kiveton Park and Wales history for more. I only stumbled on all this by accident, yesterday. I was about to wrap up a letter for a South African cousin (now in Dorset) when I noticed at the top of the tree the string of SHUGG siblings, from Gwinear, who'd multiplied considerably through to the present day. I noticed I'd never found marriages for Jane (1821) or Mary (1823). Could modern research tools help me locate them?
I was embarrassed to find this:
Clearly showing that there were not exactly many of the name anywhere. This was a great surprise. I'd a notion there were legions of Jane Shuggs in St Ives all with the father's name of John and thoroughly muddying the picture. The bad old days had you scrabbling with heavy volumes at St Catherine's House and locating one-off entries such as the one below, and having really no idea who they'd married, who they were (a widow, perhaps) or where they were going next.
Missing from the censuses was their pint-sized daughter Grace who I eventually surmised had gone with husband Emmerson up to Kiveton Park shortly after her marriage. The mines there were some ten years old: her sister had had an earlier spell at Harthill, 3 miles away, but the sisters only overlapped for a year as the elder one decided to go back to Devonport after she was widowed.
Their daughter married a mining engineer and it was their girl who worked as a nurse in Jerusalem during World War Two, coming back to England for the birth of her daughter who still lives in the wider area.
Some clarification about the counties from Wikipedia:
Kiveton Park lays claim to being in Rotherham Borough Council, has a Sheffield postcode, a Worksop telephone code, and has [Derbyshire's] Chesterfield Canal running through it, it also lays claim to being the smallest place in Europe with two railway stations.
Ends.
3 Jan 2011
Taylors
| My aunt gave us a treasure trove of photographs a few years back. One of these was cousin Joyce's wedding photograph in the Gower peninsula. We had no idea of the date but I eventually found the marriage record, and Joyce herself, in 1999. Her mother was one of my Grandpa's large Taylor clan, born in Swansea around the time of the 1901 census.
This last Christmas I decided to sit down for a day or two and worry away at the Taylors. I've made one or two positive identifications and found several possibles. I'm proudest of John Jones who lived in Pierce Street Queensferry and married Ellen Louisa Taylor in 1920 - I even have John's date of death (5 Jan), and now an address for his great-grandson. I may have stayed up till nearly 3am.
This could have been a frustrating task as Joyce wrote only a brief letter, told me a few cryptic points on the phone and now, I sadly see, died in 2005.
Update: her major clue, which at the time seemed like wilful withholding of data, was the firstname of her cousin 'in North Wales'. Believe it or not, this firstname was enough for me to locate her cousin, twelve years later, in her final years, and from this source get all the missing information, and much more. |
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